Ethio-Fake: Cutting-Edge Approaches to Combat Fake News in Under-Resourced Languages Using Explainable AI

The proliferation of fake news has emerged as a significant threat to the integrity of information dissemination, particularly on social media platforms. Misinformation can spread quickly due to the ease of creating and disseminating content, affecting public opinion and sociopolitical events. Identifying false information is therefore essential to reducing its negative consequences and maintaining the reliability of online news sources. Traditional approaches to fake news detection often rely solely on content-based features, overlooking the crucial role of social context in shaping the perception and propagation of news articles. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive approach that integrates social context-based features with news content features to enhance the accuracy of fake news detection in under-resourced languages. We perform several experiments utilizing a variety of methodologies, including traditional machine learning, neural networks, ensemble learning, and transfer learning. Assessment of the outcomes of the experiments shows that the ensemble learning approach has the highest accuracy, achieving a 0.99 F1 score. Additionally, when compared with monolingual models, the fine-tuned model with the target language outperformed others, achieving a 0.94 F1 score. We analyze the functioning of the models, considering the important features that contribute to model performance, using explainable AI techniques.

EthioLLM: Multilingual Large Language Models for Ethiopian Languages with Task Evaluation

Large language models (LLMs) have gained popularity recently due to their outstanding performance in various downstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, low-resource languages are still lagging behind current state-of-the-art (SOTA) developments in the field of NLP due to insufficient resources to train LLMs. Ethiopian languages exhibit remarkable linguistic diversity, encompassing a wide array of scripts, and are imbued with profound religious and cultural significance. This paper introduces EthioLLM -- multilingual large language models for five Ethiopian languages (Amharic, Ge'ez, Afan Oromo, Somali, and Tigrinya) and English, and Ethiobenchmark -- a new benchmark dataset for various downstream NLP tasks. We evaluate the performance of these models across five downstream NLP tasks. We open-source our multilingual language models, new benchmark datasets for various downstream tasks, and task-specific fine-tuned language models and discuss the performance of the models. Our dataset and models are available at the https://huggingface.co/EthioNLP repository.

MasakhaNEWS: News Topic Classification for African languages

African languages are severely under-represented in NLP research due to lack of datasets covering several NLP tasks. While there are individual language specific datasets that are being expanded to different tasks, only a handful of NLP tasks (e.g. named entity recognition and machine translation) have standardized benchmark datasets covering several geographical and typologically-diverse African languages. In this paper, we develop MasakhaNEWS -- a new benchmark dataset for news topic classification covering 16 languages widely spoken in Africa. We provide an evaluation of baseline models by training classical machine learning models and fine-tuning several language models. Furthermore, we explore several alternatives to full fine-tuning of language models that are better suited for zero-shot and few-shot learning such as cross-lingual parameter-efficient fine-tuning (like MAD-X), pattern exploiting training (PET), prompting language models (like ChatGPT), and prompt-free sentence transformer fine-tuning (SetFit and Cohere Embedding API). Our evaluation in zero-shot setting shows the potential of prompting ChatGPT for news topic classification in low-resource African languages, achieving an average performance of 70 F1 points without leveraging additional supervision like MAD-X. In few-shot setting, we show that with as little as 10 examples per label, we achieved more than 90\% (i.e. 86.0 F1 points) of the performance of full supervised training (92.6 F1 points) leveraging the PET approach.

Transformer-based Model for Word Level Language Identification in Code-mixed Kannada-English Texts

Using code-mixed data in natural language processing (NLP) research currently gets a lot of attention. Language identification of social media code-mixed text has been an interesting problem of study in recent years due to the advancement and influences of social media in communication. This paper presents the Instituto Polit\'ecnico Nacional, Centro de Investigaci\'on en Computaci\'on (CIC) team's system description paper for the CoLI-Kanglish shared task at ICON2022. In this paper, we propose the use of a Transformer based model for word-level language identification in code-mixed Kannada English texts. The proposed model on the CoLI-Kenglish dataset achieves a weighted F1-score of 0.84 and a macro F1-score of 0.61.