Fake news detection techniques are a topic of interest due to the vast abundance of fake news data accessible via social media. The present fake news detection system performs satisfactorily on well-balanced data. However, when the dataset is biased, these models perform poorly. Additionally, manual labeling of fake news data is time-consuming, though we have enough fake news traversing the internet. Thus, we introduce a text augmentation technique with a Bidirectional Encoder Representation of Transformers (BERT) language model to generate an augmented dataset composed of synthetic fake data. The proposed approach overcomes the issue of minority class and performs the classification with the AugFake-BERT model (trained with an augmented dataset). The proposed strategy is evaluated with twelve different state-of-the-art models. The proposed model outperforms the existing models with an accuracy of 92.45%. Moreover, accuracy, precision, recall, and f1-score performance metrics are utilized to evaluate the proposed strategy and demonstrate that a balanced dataset significantly affects classification performance.

Due to the significant increase in Internet activity since the COVID-19 epidemic, many informal, unstructured, offensive, and even misspelled textual content has been used for online communication through various social media. The Bengali and Banglish(Bengali words written in English format) offensive texts have recently been widely used to harass and criticize people on various social media. Our deep excavation reveals that limited work has been done to identify offensive Bengali texts. In this study, we have engineered a detection mechanism using natural language processing to identify Bengali and Banglish offensive messages in social media that could abuse other people. First, different classifiers have been employed to classify the offensive text as baseline classifiers from real-life datasets. Then, we applied boosting algorithms based on baseline classifiers. AdaBoost is the most effective ensemble method called adaptive boosting, which enhances the outcomes of the classifiers. The long short-term memory (LSTM) model is used to eliminate long-term dependency problems when classifying text, but overfitting problems occur. AdaBoost has strong forecasting ability and overfitting problem does not occur easily. By considering these two powerful and diverse models, we propose L-Boost, the modified AdaBoost algorithm using bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) with LSTM models. We tested the L-Boost model on three separate datasets, including the BERT pre-trained word-embedding vector model. We find our proposed L-Boost’s efficacy better than all the baseline classification algorithms reaching an accuracy of 95.11%.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) deals with analysing, understanding and generating languages likes human. One of the challenges of NLP is training computers to understand the way of learning and using a language as human. Every training session consists of several types of sentences with different context and linguistic structures. Meaning of a sentence depends on actual meaning of main words with their correct positions. Same word can be used as a noun or adjective or others based on their position. In NLP, Word Embedding is a powerful method which is trained on large collection of texts and encoded general semantic and syntactic information of words. Choosing a right word embedding generates more efficient result than others. Most of the papers used pretrained word embedding vector in deep learning for NLP processing. But, the major issue of pretrained word embedding vector is that it can’t use for all types of NLP processing. In this paper, a local word embedding vector formation process have been proposed and shown a comparison between pretrained and local word embedding vectors for Bengali language. The Keras framework is used in Python for local word embedding implementation and analysis section of this paper shows proposed model produced 87.84% accuracy result which is better than fastText pretrained word embedding vectors accuracy 86.75%. Using this proposed method NLP researchers of Bengali language can easily build the specific word embedding vectors for word representation in Natural Language Processing.