HANCaps: A Two-Channel Deep Learning Framework for Fake News Detection in Thai

Abstract

The rapid advancement of internet technology, widespread smartphone usage, and the rise of social media platforms have drastically transformed the global communication landscape. These developments have resulted in both positive and negative consequences. On the one hand, they have facilitated the dissemination of information, connecting individuals across vast distances and fostering diverse perspectives. On the other hand, the ease of access to online platforms has led to the proliferation of misinformation, often in the form of fake news. Detecting and combatting fake news has become crucial to mitigate its adverse effects on society. This paper presents an investigation into fake news detection in the Thai language. It addresses current limitations in this domain by proposing a novel two-channel deep learning model named HANCaps, which integrates BERT and FastText embeddings with a hierarchical attention network and capsule network. The HANCaps model utilizes the BERT language model as one channel input, while the other channel incorporates pre-trained FastText embeddings. The proposed model undergoes evaluation using a benchmark Thai fake news dataset, and extensive experimentation demonstrates that HANCaps outperforms state-of-the-art methods by up to 3.28% in terms of F1 score, showcasing its superior performance.