NITK-IT-NLP@DravidianLangTech-2023: Impact of Focal Loss on Malayalam Fake News Detection using Transformers

Abstract

Fake News Detection in Dravidian Languages is a shared task that identifies YouTube comments in the Malayalam language for fake news detection. In this work, we have proposed a transformer-based model with cross-entropy loss and focal loss, which classifies the comments into fake or authentic news. We have used different transformer-based models for the dataset with modifications in the experimental setup, out of which the fine-tuned model, which is based on MuRIL with focal loss, achieved the best overall macro F1-score of 0.87, and we got second position in the final leaderboard. © DravidianLangTech 2023 - 3rd Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages, associated with 14th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, RANLP 2023 - Proceedings.