Fake News Detection Using Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing

The rise of social media has brought the rise of fake news and this fake news comes with negative consequences. With fake news being such a huge issue, efforts should be made to identify any forms of fake news however it is not so simple. Manually identifying fake news can be extremely subjective as determining the accuracy of the information in a story is complex and difficult to perform, even for experts. On the other hand, an automated solution would require a good understanding of NLP which is also complex and may have difficulties producing an accurate output. Therefore, the main problem focused on this project is the viability of developing a system that can effectively and accurately detect and identify fake news. Finding a solution would be a significant benefit to the media industry, particularly the social media industry as this is where a large proportion of fake news is published and spread. In order to find a solution to this problem, this project proposed the development of a fake news identification system using deep learning and natural language processing. The system was developed using a Word2vec model combined with a Long Short-Term Memory model in order to showcase the compatibility of the two models in a whole system. This system was trained and tested using two different dataset collections that each consisted of one real news dataset and one fake news dataset. Furthermore, three independent variables were chosen which were the number of training cycles, data diversity and vector size to analyze the relationship between these variables and the accuracy levels of the system. It was found that these three variables did have a significant effect on the accuracy of the system. From this, the system was then trained and tested with the optimal variables and was able to achieve the minimum expected accuracy level of 90%. The achieving of this accuracy levels confirms the compatibility of the LSTM and Word2vec model and their capability to be synergized into a single system that is able to identify fake news with a high level of accuracy.