Fake News Detection using Bi-directional LSTM-Recurrent Neural Network

Media plays a vital role in the public dissemination of information about events. The rapid development of the Internet allows a quick spread of information through social networks or websites. Without the concern about the credibility of the information, the unverified or fake news is spread in social networks and reach thousands of users. Fake news is typically generated for commercial and political interests to mislead and attract readers. The spread of fake news has raised a big challenge to society. Automatic credibility analysis of news articles is a current research interest. Deep learning models are widely used for linguistic modeling. Typical deep learning models such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) can detect complex patterns in textual data. Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) is a tree-structured recurrent neural network used to analyze variable-length sequential data. Bi-directional LSTM allows looking at particular sequence both from front-to-back as well as from back-to-front. The paper presents a fake news detection model based on Bi-directional LSTM-recurrent neural network. Two publicly available unstructured news articles datasets are used to assess the performance of the model. The result shows the superiority in terms of accuracy of Bi-directional LSTM model over other methods namely CNN, vanilla RNN and unidirectional LSTM for fake news detection. (C) 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.