Fake news detection: Taxonomy and comparative study

The proliferation of social networks has presented a significant challenge in combating the pervasive issue of fake news within modern societies. Due to the large amount of information and news produced daily in text, audio, and video, the validation and verification of this information have become crucial tasks. Leveraging advancements in artificial intelligence, distinguishing between fake news and factual information through automatic fake news detection systems has become more feasible. Automatic fake news detection has been explored from diverse perspectives, employing various feature extraction and classification models. Nonetheless, empirical evaluations, categorization, and comparisons of existing techniques for handling this problem remain limited. In this paper, we revisit the definitions and perspectives of fake news and propose an updated taxonomy for the field based on multiple criteria: (1) Type of features used in fake news detection; (2) Fake news detection perspectives; (3) Feature representation methods; and (4) Classification approaches. Moreover, we conduct an extensive empirical study to evaluate several feature representation techniques and classification approaches based on accuracy and computational cost. Our experimental results demonstrate that the optimal feature extraction techniques vary depending on the characteristics of the dataset. Notably, context-dependent models based on transformer models consistently exhibit superior performance. Additionally, employing transformer models as feature extraction methods, rather than solely fine-tuning the network for the downstream task, improves overall performance. Through extensive error analysis, we identify that a combination of feature representation methods and classification algorithms, including classical ones, offer complementary aspects and should be considered for achieving better generalization performance while maintaining a relatively low computational cost. For further details, including source codes, figures, and datasets, please refer to our project's GitHub repository: [https://github.com/FFarhangian/Fake-news-detection-Comparative-Study].