An Explainable Fake News Detector Based on Named Entity Recognition and Stance Classification Applied to COVID-19

Over the last few years, the phenomenon of fake news has become an important issue, especially during the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, and also a serious risk for the public health. Due to the huge amount of information that is produced by the social media such as Facebook and Twitter it is becoming difficult to check the produced contents manually. This study proposes an automatic fake news detection system that supports or disproves the dubious claims while returning a set of documents from verified sources. The system is composed of multiple modules and it makes use of different techniques from machine learning, deep learning and natural language processing. Such techniques are used for the selection of relevant documents, to find among those, the ones that are similar to the tested claim and their stances. The proposed system will be used to check medical news and, in particular, the trustworthiness of posts related to the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccine and cure.