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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.02609 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02609/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): Concepts, Taxonomies, Opportunities and Challenges toward Responsible AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10045/) (2019)
- [Fake News Detection on Social Media: A Data Mining Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01967/) (2017)
- [A Diagnostic Study of Explainability Techniques for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13295/) (2020)
- [CSI: A Hybrid Deep Model for Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06959/) (2017)
- [A Stylometric Inquiry into Hyperpartisan and Fake News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05638/) (2017)
- [AfroLM: A Self-Active Learning-based Multilingual Pretrained Language Model for 23 African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03263/) (2022)
- [Explainable Artificial Intelligence: A Survey of Needs, Techniques, Applications, and Future Direction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00265/) (2024)
- [Machine learning and deep learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05314/) (2021)
- [Semantic-Driven Topic Modeling Using Transformer-Based Embeddings and Clustering Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00134/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [A Unified Framework with Novel Metrics for Evaluating the Effectiveness of XAI Techniques in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05050/) (2025)
- [Explainability in Neural Networks for Natural Language Processing Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18036/) (2024)
- [Explainable AI: XAI-Guided Context-Aware Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03484/) (2025)
- [Toxicity in Online Platforms and AI Systems: A Survey of Needs, Challenges, Mitigations, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25539/) (2025)
- [Semantic-Driven Topic Modeling for Analyzing Creativity in Virtual Brainstorming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16835/) (2025)
- [Bilingual Word Level Language Identification for Omotic Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.07998/) (2025)
- [Explainable AI: Context-Aware Layer-Wise Integrated Gradients for Explaining Transformer Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.16608/) (2026)
- [Hybrid Extractive Abstractive Summarization for Multilingual Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06929/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.