New explainability method for BERT-based model in fake news detection

Abstract The ubiquity of social media and their deep integration in the contemporary society has granted new ways to interact, exchange information, form groups, or earn money—all on a scale never seen before. Those possibilities paired with the widespread popularity contribute to the level of impact that social media display. Unfortunately, the benefits brought by them come at a cost. Social Media can be employed by various entities to spread disinformation—so called ‘Fake News’, either to make a profit or influence the behaviour of the society. To reduce the impact and spread of Fake News, a diverse array of countermeasures were devised. These include linguistic-based approaches, which often utilise Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Deep Learning (DL). However, as the latest advancements in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) domain show, the model’s high performance is no longer enough. The explainability of the system’s decision is equally crucial in real-life scenarios. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to present a novel explainability approach in BERT-based fake news detectors. This approach does not require extensive changes to the system and can be attached as an extension for operating detectors. For this purposes, two Explainable Artificial Intelligence (xAI) techniques, Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) and Anchors, will be used and evaluated on fake news data, i.e., short pieces of text forming tweets or headlines. This focus of this paper is on the explainability approach for fake news detectors, as the detectors themselves were part of previous works of the authors.