Papers › Localization of Fake News Detection via Multitask Transfer Learning

Localization of Fake News Detection via Multitask Transfer Learning

21 Oct 2019LREC 2020 5arXiv:1910.09295archive 2025-07-28

Jan Christian Blaise Cruz, Julianne Agatha Tan, Charibeth Cheng

The use of the internet as a fast medium of spreading fake news reinforces the need for computational tools that combat it. Techniques that train fake news classifiers exist, but they all assume an abundance of resources including large labeled datasets and expert-curated corpora, which low-resource languages may not have. In this work, we make two main contributions: First, we alleviate resource scarcity by constructing the first expertly-curated benchmark dataset for fake news detection in Filipino, which we call "Fake News Filipino." Second, we benchmark Transfer Learning (TL) techniques and show that they can be used to train robust fake news classifiers from little data, achieving 91% accuracy on our fake news dataset, reducing the error by 14% compared to established few-shot baselines. Furthermore, lifting ideas from multitask learning, we show that augmenting transformer-based transfer techniques with auxiliary language modeling losses improves their performance by adapting to writing style. Using this, we improve TL performance by 4-6%, achieving an accuracy of 96% on our best model. Lastly, we show that our method generalizes well to different types of news articles, including political news, entertainment news, and opinion articles.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

Code

jcblaisecruz02/Tagalog-fake-news officialmentioned in paper report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

ArticlesFake News DetectionLanguage ModelingLanguage ModellingTransfer Learning

Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

Fake News Filipino Dataset

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections