Fake news and deceptive machine-generated text are serious problems threatening modern societies, including in the Arab world. This motivates work on detecting false and manipulated stories online. However, a bottleneck for this research is lack of sufficient data to train detection models. We present a novel method for automatically generating Arabic manipulated (and potentially fake) news stories. Our method is simple and only depends on availability of true stories, which are abundant online, and a part of speech tagger (POS). To facilitate future work, we dispense with both of these requirements altogether by providing AraNews, a novel and large POS-tagged news dataset that can be used off-the-shelf. Using stories generated based on AraNews, we carry out a human annotation study that casts light on the effects of machine manipulation on text veracity. The study also measures human ability to detect Arabic machine manipulated text generated by our method. Finally, we develop the first models for detecting manipulated Arabic news and achieve state-of-the-art results on Arabic fake news detection (macro F1=70.06). Our models and data are publicly available.
University of Sharjah（沙迦大学）；Western University（韦仕敦大学）
Social media is becoming a source of news for many people due to its ease and freedom of use. As a result, fake news has been spreading quickly and easily regardless of its credibility, especially in the last decade. Fake news publishers take advantage of critical situations such as the Covid-19 pandemic and the American presidential elections to affect societies negatively. Fake news can seriously impact society in many fields including politics, finance, sports, etc. Many studies have been conducted to help detect fake news in English, but research conducted on fake news detection in the Ara…
Research Centre on Scientific and Technical Information (CERIST)（科学技术信息研究中心）
Along with the COVID-19 pandemic, an "infodemic" of false and misleading information has emerged and has complicated the COVID-19 response efforts. Social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter have contributed largely to the spread of rumors, conspiracy theories, hate, xenophobia, racism, and prejudice. To combat the spread of fake news, researchers around the world have and are still making considerable efforts to build and share COVID-19 related research articles, models, and datasets. This paper releases "AraCOVID19-MFH" a manually annotated multi-label Arabic COVID-19 fake news and…
SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
The rapid progress of photorealistic synthesis techniques has reached at a critical point where the boundary between real and manipulated images starts to blur. Thus, benchmarking and advancing digital forgery analysis have become a pressing issue. However, existing face forgery datasets either have limited diversity or only support coarse-grained analysis. To counter this emerging threat, we construct the ForgeryNet dataset, an extremely large face forgery dataset with unified annotations in image- and video-level data across four tasks: 1) Image Forgery Classification, including two-way (rea…
Over the last years, there has been an unprecedented proliferation of fake news. As a consequence, we are more susceptible to the pernicious impact that misinformation and disinformation spreading can have in different segments of our society. Thus, the development of tools for automatic detection of fake news plays and important role in the prevention of its negative effects. Most attempts to detect and classify false content focus only on using textual information. Multimodal approaches are less frequent and they typically classify news either as true or fake. In this work, we perform a fine…
Research Group in Computational Linguistics（计算语言学研究小组）；University of Wolverhampton, UK（英国沃尔夫汉普顿大学）；Centre for Translation Studies（翻译研究中心）；University of Surrey, UK（英国萨里大学）
One very common type of fake news is satire which comes in a form of a news website or an online platform that parodies reputable real news agencies to create a sarcastic version of reality. This type of fake news is often disseminated by individuals on their online platforms as it has a much stronger effect in delivering criticism than through a straightforward message. However, when the satirical text is disseminated via social media without mention of its source, it can be mistaken for real news. This study conducts several exploratory analyses to identify the linguistic properties of Arabi…
Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（卡塔尔计算研究所（哈马德·本·哈利法大学））；University of Padova（帕多瓦大学）
While COVID-19 vaccines are finally becoming widely available, a second pandemic that revolves around the circulation of anti-vaxxer fake news may hinder efforts to recover from the first one. With this in mind, we performed an extensive analysis of Arabic and English tweets about COVID-19 vaccines, with focus on messages originating from Qatar. We found that Arabic tweets contain a lot of false information and rumors, while English tweets are mostly factual. However, English tweets are much more propagandistic than Arabic ones. In terms of propaganda techniques, about half of the Arabic tweet…
Echoes of Unrest: A Multimodal NLP Framework for Early Warning of Fake News and Violence-Driven Mob Activity
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Dhaka International University（达卡国际大学计算机科学与工程系）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology（孟加拉国工程技术大学计算机科学与工程系）
Shahjalal University of Science and Technology（沙贾拉尔科技大学）；Mapbox；University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）；Fordham University（福特汉姆大学）
The creation of altered and manipulated faces has become more common due to the improvement of DeepFake generation methods. Simultaneously, we have seen detection models' development for differentiating between a manipulated and original face from image or video content. In this paper, we focus on identifying the limitations and shortcomings of existing deepfake detection frameworks. We identified some key problems surrounding deepfake detection through quantitative and qualitative analysis of existing methods and datasets. We found that deepfake datasets are highly oversampled, causing models…
SceneFake: An Initial Dataset and Benchmarks for Scene Fake Audio Detection
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Anhui University（安徽大学）
We present our on-going effort of constructing a large-scale benchmark for face forgery detection. The first version of this benchmark, DeeperForensics-1.0, represents the largest face forgery detection dataset by far, with 60,000 videos constituted by a total of 17.6 million frames, 10 times larger than existing datasets of the same kind. Extensive real-world perturbations are applied to obtain a more challenging benchmark of larger scale and higher diversity. All source videos in DeeperForensics-1.0 are carefully collected, and fake videos are generated by a newly proposed end-to-end face sw…
Ferhat Abbas University, Setif 1（费尔哈特·阿巴斯大学塞提夫第一大学）；Qatar Computing Research Institute（卡塔尔计算研究所）；Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU)（哈马德·本·哈利法大学）
During the last two decades, we have progressively turned to the Internet and social media to find news, entertain conversations and share opinion. Recently, OpenAI has developed a ma-chine learning system called GPT-2 for Generative Pre-trained Transformer-2, which can pro-duce deepfake texts. It can generate blocks of text based on brief writing prompts that look like they were written by humans, facilitating the spread false or auto-generated text. In line with this progress, and in order to counteract potential dangers, several methods have been pro-posed for detecting text written by thes…
The possibility of carrying out a meaningful forensics analysis on printed and scanned images plays a major role in many applications. First of all, printed documents are often associated with criminal activities, such as terrorist plans, child pornography pictures, and even fake packages. Additionally, printing and scanning can be used to hide the traces of image manipulation or the synthetic nature of images, since the artifacts commonly found in manipulated and synthetic images are gone after the images are printed and scanned. A problem hindering research in this area is the lack of large …
Qatar Computing Research Institute HBKU（卡塔尔计算研究所（HBKU））；University of Padova（帕多瓦大学）；Qatar University（卡塔尔大学）；DIT Università di Bologna（博洛尼亚大学DIT学院）；Newtral Media Audiovisual；Sofia University（索非亚大学）；University of Duisburg-Essen（杜伊斯堡-埃森大学）；University of Applied Sciences Potsdam（波茨坦应用科学大学）；University of Hildesheim（希尔德斯海姆大学）；TOBB University of Economics and Technology（托普卡帕经济与技术大学）
We describe the fourth edition of the CheckThat! Lab, part of the 2021 Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF). The lab evaluates technology supporting tasks related to factuality, and covers Arabic, Bulgarian, English, Spanish, and Turkish. Task 1 asks to predict which posts in a Twitter stream are worth fact-checking, focusing on COVID-19 and politics (in all five languages). Task 2 asks to determine whether a claim in a tweet can be verified using a set of previously fact-checked claims (in Arabic and English). Task 3 asks to predict the veracity of a news article and its topical…
Half-Truth: A Partially Fake Audio Detection Dataset
National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所模式识别国家重点实验室）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
本文构建 HAD 部分伪造音频检测数据集，采用最新语音合成技术仅替换语句中的少数词语，支持伪造检测与篡改区域定位，并通过基准实验证明其比完全伪造音频更具挑战性。
TIB Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology（莱布尼茨科技信息中心）；L3S Research Center, Leibniz University Hannover（汉诺威莱布尼茨大学L3S研究中心）
In this digital age of news consumption, a news reader has the ability to react, express and share opinions with others in a highly interactive and fast manner. As a consequence, fake news has made its way into our daily life because of very limited capacity to verify news on the Internet by large companies as well as individuals. In this paper, we focus on solving two problems which are part of the fact-checking ecosystem that can help to automate fact-checking of claims in an ever increasing stream of content on social media. For the first problem, claim check-worthiness prediction, we explo…
