A Hybrid Multitask Learning Framework with a Fire Hawk Optimizer for Arabic Fake News Detection

Mohamed Abd Elaziz (), Abdelghani Dahou, Dina Ahmed Orabi, Samah Alshathri (), Eman M. Soliman and Ahmed A. Ewees
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Mohamed Abd Elaziz: Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Science, Zagazig University, Zagazig 44519, Egypt
Abdelghani Dahou: Mathematics and Computer Science Department, University of Ahmed DRAIA, Adrar 01000, Algeria
Dina Ahmed Orabi: Faculty of Media Production, Galala University, Suez 435611, Egypt
Samah Alshathri: Department of Information Technology, College of Computer and Information Sciences, Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University, P.O. Box 84428, Riyadh 11671, Saudi Arabia
Eman M. Soliman: Faculty of Media Production, Galala University, Suez 435611, Egypt
Ahmed A. Ewees: Department of Computer, Damietta University, Damietta 34517, Egypt

Mathematics, 2023, vol. 11, issue 2, 1-15

Abstract: The exponential spread of news and posts related to the COVID-19 pandemic on social media platforms led to the emergence of the disinformation phenomenon. The phenomenon of spreading fake information and news creates significant concern for the public health and safety of the population. In this paper, we propose a disinformation detection framework based on multi-task learning (MTL) and meta-heuristic algorithms in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The developed framework uses an MTL and a pre-trained transformer-based model to learn and extract contextual feature representations from Arabic social media posts. The extracted contextual representations are fed to an alternative feature selection technique which depends on modified version of the Fire Hawk Optimizer. The proposed framework, which aims to improve the disinformation detection rate, was evaluated on several datasets of Arabic social media posts. The experimental results show that the proposed framework can achieve accuracy of 59%. It obtained, at best, precision, recall, and F-measure of 53%, 71%, and 53%, respectively, on all datasets; and it outperformed the other algorithms in all measures.

Keywords: social media platforms; fake information; multi-task learning (MTL); feature selection; Fire Hawk Optimizer (FHO) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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