'Bend the truth': Benchmark dataset for fake news detection in Urdu language and its evaluation

The paper presents a new corpus for fake news detection in the Urdu language along with the baseline classification and its evaluation. With the escalating use of the Internet worldwide and substantially increasing impact produced by the availability of ambiguous information, the challenge to quickly identify fake news in digital media in various languages becomes more acute. We provide a manually assembled and verified dataset containing 900 news articles, 500 annotated as real and 400, as fake, allowing the investigation of automated fake news detection approaches in Urdu. The news articles in the truthful subset come from legitimate news sources, and their validity has been manually verified. In the fake subset, the known difficulty of finding fake news was solved by hiring professional journalists native in Urdu who were instructed to intentionally write deceptive news articles. The dataset contains 5 different topics: (i) Business, (ii) Health, (iii) Showbiz, (iv) Sports, and (v) Technology. To establish our Urdu dataset as a benchmark, we performed baseline classification. We crafted a variety of text representation feature sets including word n-grams, character n-grams, functional word n-grams, and their combinations. After applying a variety of feature weighting schemes, we ran a series of classifiers on the train-test split. The results show sizable performance gains by AdaBoost classifier with 0.87 F1Fake and 0.90 F1Real. We provide the results evaluated against different metrics for a convenient comparison of future research. The dataset is publicly available for research purposes.