Novel approach for Arabic fake news classification using embedding from large language features with CNN-LSTM ensemble model and explainable AI

The widespread fake news challenges the management of low-quality information, making effective detection strategies necessary. This study addresses this critical issue by advancing fake news detection in Arabic and overcoming limitations in existing approaches. Deep learning models, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), EfficientNetB4, Inception, Xception, ResNet, ConvLSTM and a novel voting ensemble framework combining CNN and LSTM are employed for text classification. The proposed framework integrates the ELMO word embedding technique having contextual representation capabilities, which is compared with GloVe, BERT, FastText and FastText subwords. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed voting ensemble, combined with ELMo word embeddings, consistently outperforms previous approaches. It achieves an accuracy of 98.42%, precision of 98.54%, recall of 99.5%, and an F1 score of 98.93%, offering an efficient and highly effective solution for text classification tasks.The proposed framework benchmark against state-of-the-art transformer architectures, including BERT and RoBERTa, demonstrates competitive performance with significantly reduced inference time and enhanced interpretability accompanied by a 5-fold cross-validation technique. Furthermore, this research utilizes the LIME XAI technique to provide deeper insights into the contribution of each feature in predicting a specific target class. These findings show the proposed framework’s effectiveness in dealing with the issues of detecting false news, particularly in Arabic text. By generating higher performance metrics and displaying comparable results, this work opens the way for more reliable and interpretable text classification solutions.