Enhancing Fake News Detection in Romanian Using Transformer-Based Back Translation Augmentation

Abstract

Misinformation poses a significant challenge in the digital age, requiring robust methods to detect fake news. This study investigates the effectiveness of using Back Translation (BT) augmentation, specifically transformer-based models, to improve fake news detection in Romanian. Using a data set extracted from Factual.ro, the research finds that BT-augmented models show better accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, and AUC compared to those using the original data set. Additionally, using mBART for BT augmentation with French as a target language improved the model’s performance compared to Google Translate. The Extra Trees Classifier and the Random Forest Classifier performed the best among the models tested. The findings suggest that the use of BT augmentation with transformer-based models, such as mBART, has the potential to enhance fake news detection. More research is needed to evaluate the effects in other languages.