Arabic Fake News Detection Using Deep Learning and Transformer-Based Models
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31642/JoKMC/2018/130210Keywords:
Arabic Fake News Detection, AraNews, AraBERT, Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing, CNN, BiLSTM, Transformer ModelsAbstract
With the emergence of digital news platforms and social media, Arabic News content is spreading throughout erroneously. Hence, automatic fake news detection is an important task in natural language processing due to the fact that Arabic suffers from rich morphology, orthographic variations, a great amount of dialects diversity together with code-switching. This study provides a comparative experimental analysis of Arabic fake news detection models and finds the best model architecture on a common dataset and evaluation protocol.
Utilizing balanced Arabic real and fake news articles, the AraNews dataset was used to conduct the experiments. The task was looked at as a classic classification problem with two labelled classes, Real and Fake. The tested models are SVM with TF-IDF features, LSTM, GRU, BiLSTM, CNN-LSTM the AraBERT + 1D-CNN and AraBERT + 2D-CNN. Arabic text was normalized, cleaned, tokenized and vectorized (using TF-IDF, word embeddings or AraBERT contextual embeddings depending on the model type).
The outcome We can see that the best results are in AraBERT + 2D-CNN model, for the accuracy is up to 97.8% and got F1-score →0.98 That said, this discussion does not take the position that deep learning is always best. We discuss our findings in terms of the size of the datasets, how complex or simple a model is, located part on how humans represent context information with an immediate comparison to recent Arabic fake news detection experiments. The results demonstrate that transformer-based contextual embeddings offer a substantial boost for Arabic news classification, whereas conventional and recurrent models are still solid baselines to consider in low-resource or resource-constrained environments.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Abdullah Abdulabbas Nahi Alrabeeah, Mohammed Mahdi Hashim , Amna Kadhim Ali

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