Combating fake news in “low-resource” languages: Amharic fake news detection accompanied by resource crafting

Abstract

The need to fight the progressive negative impact of fake news is escalating, which is evi-dent in the strive to do research and develop tools that could do this job. However, a lack of adequate datasets and good word embeddings have posed challenges to make detection methods sufficiently accurate. These resources are even totally missing for “low-resource” African languages, such as Amharic. Alleviating these critical problems should not be left for tomorrow. Deep learning methods and word embeddings contributed a lot in devising automatic fake news detection mechanisms. Several contributions are presented, including an Amharic fake news detection model, a general-purpose Amharic corpus (GPAC), a novel Amharic fake news detection dataset (ETH_FAKE), and Amharic fasttext word embedding (AMFTWE). Our Amharic fake news detection model, evaluated with the ETH_FAKE dataset and using the AMFTWE, performed very well.