Text-based fake news detection: DONE!
In the final phase of the Google Summer of Code, Masha fine-tuned the classifier for sensationalism detection and added a left-right bias classifier.
The system is a bit too resource-heavy to run as an on-site demo, but all of the code and data to run the classifier locally is available from Github. The Bias Classifier directory on Github contains the trained model, as well as Python code to train a model and to classify new data, the data used for training, and a sample of test data (a held-out set) with true labels and the classifier scores. In the training data, label ‘0’ corresponds to the ‘least-biased’ class, ‘1’ corresponds to ‘left’, and ‘2’ corresponds to ‘right’.
This classifier takes as input a 2-column CSV file, where the first column corresponds to the headlines and second one corresponds to the article texts.
Usage for the Python code:
python bias_classifier.py -args
The arguments are:
-t, --trainset: Path to training data (if you are training a model)
-m, --model: Path to model (if you are using a pre-trained model)
-d, --dump: Dump trained model? Default is False
-v, --verbose: Default is non-verbose
-c, --classify: Path to new inputs to classify
-s, --save: Path to the output file (default is 'output.csv')
Output:
The output is a number between -1 and 1, where -1 is most left-biased, 1 is most right-biased, and 0 is least-biased.
Data:
The articles come from the crawled data - a hand-picked subset of sites that were labeled as "right", "right-center", "left", "left-center", and "least-biased" by mediabiasfactcheck.com. I used one subset of sources for the training data and a different subset of sources for the testing data in order to avoid overfitting. I also trained a separate model on all of the sources I had available - since it is trained on more data, it may perform better. This model is also available in the Github directory under the name “trained_model_all_sources.pkl”
It is worth noting that articles from 'right-center' and 'left-center' sources often exhibit only a subtle bias, if any at all. This is because the bias of these sources is often not evident on a per-article basis, but only on a per-source basis. It may exhibit itself, for example, through story selection rather than through loaded language. For this reason I did not include articles from 'right-center' and 'left-center' sources in the training data, but I did use them for evaluation.
Architecture:
The classifier has a two-tiered architecture, where first the unbiased articles are filtered out, and then a second model distinguishes between right and left bias. Both models are Logistic Regressions based on lexical n-gram features, implemented through scikit-learn.
Features:
Both models rely on bag-of-word n-gram features (unigrams, bigrams, trigrams).
Results:
The output is a number between -1 and 1, where -1 is most left-biased, 1 is most right-biased, and 0 is least-biased. For evaluation purposes, scores below 0 are considered “left”, above 0 are considered “right”, and 0 is considered “least-biased”.
As previously mentioned, along with the 3 classes that are present in the training data, there are two addition in-between classes that I used for evaluation only.
In order to be counted as correct for recall, right-center can be predicted as either 'right' or 'least-biased', and left-center can be predicted as 'left' or 'least-biased'. In addition, when calculating the precision of the 'least-biased' class, 'least-biased', 'right-center' and 'left-center' true classes all count as correct.
Class Precision Recall Right 45% 82% Left 70% 71% Right-center N/A 70% Left-center N/A 60% Least-biased 96% 33%
Note:
Unlike the Sensationalism classifier, this classifier relies on lexical features, which may be specific to the current political climate etc. This means that the training data might "expire" and as a result the accuracy could decrease.