Vernon-fenwick at SemEval-2019 task 4: Hyperpartisan news detection using lexical and semantic features

Abstract

In this paper, we present our submission for SemEval-2019 Task 4: Hyperpartisan News Detection. Hyperpartisan news articles are sharply polarized and extremely biased (one-sided). It shows blind beliefs, opinions and unreasonable adherence to a party, idea, faction or a person. Through this task, we aim to develop an automated system that can be used to detect hyperpartisan news and serve as a prescreening technique for fake news detection. The proposed system jointly uses a rich set of handcrafted textual and semantic features. Our system achieved 2nd rank on the primary metric (82.0% accuracy) and 1st rank on the secondary metric (82.1% F1-score), among all participating teams. Comparison with the best performing system on the leaderboard1 shows that our system is behind by only 0.2% absolute difference in accuracy.