NITK_NLP at CheckThat! 2021: Ensemble transformer model for fake news classification

Abstract

Social media has become an inevitable part of our life as we are primarily dependent on them to get most of the news around us. However, the amount of false information propagated through it is much higher than the genuine ones, thus becoming a peril to society. In this paper, we have proposed a model for Fake News Classification as a part of CLEF2021 Checkthat! Lab1 shared task, which had Multi-class Fake News Detection and Topical Domain Classification of News Articles. We have used an ensemble model consisting of pre-trained transformer-based models that helped us achieve 4tℎ and 1st positions on the leaderboard of the two tasks. We achieved an F1-score of 0.4483 against a top score of 0.8376 in one task and a score of 0.8813 in another. © 2021 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).