The PolitiFact-Oslo Corpus: A New Dataset for Fake News Analysis and Detection

Abstract

This study presents a new dataset for fake news analysis and detection, namely, the PolitiFact-Oslo Corpus. The corpus contains samples of both fake and real news in English, collected from the fact-checking website PolitiFact.com. It grew out of a need for a more controlled and effective dataset for fake news analysis and detection model development based on recent events. Three features make it uniquely placed for this: (i) the texts have been individually labelled for veracity by experts, (ii) they are complete texts that strictly correspond to the claims in question, and (iii) they are accompanied by important metadata such as text type (e.g., social media, news and blog). In relation to this, we present a pipeline for collecting quality data from major fact-checking websites, a procedure which can be replicated in future corpus building efforts. An exploratory analysis based on sentiment and part-of-speech information reveals interesting differences between fake and real news as well as between text types, thus highlighting the importance of adding contextual information to fake news corpora. Since the main application of the PolitiFact-Oslo Corpus is in automatic fake news detection, we critically examine the applicability of the corpus and another PolitiFact dataset built based on less strict criteria for various deep learning-based efficient approaches, such as Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM), LSTM fine-tuned transformers such as Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and RoBERTa, and XLNet.

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“…As a result, texts written by several different authors representing different genres, such as news articles and blog posts, have been collected in the same data set. However, a certain level of objectivity and quality can be guaranteed, since all articles are checked by professional fact-checkers [9,11]. In particular, for these data sets, one cannot be sure of the author's intention to mislead.…”