Enhancing Disinformation Detection with Explainable AI and Named Entity Replacement
This work addresses the societal challenge of detecting disinformation in natural language processing, but it is incremental as it builds on existing methods with data preprocessing enhancements.
The paper tackled the problem of disinformation detection by using explainable AI to identify and remove spurious features like URLs and emoticons, and applying named entity replacement to reduce model bias, resulting in an average performance improvement of 65.78% on external test data.
The automatic detection of disinformation presents a significant challenge in the field of natural language processing. This task addresses a multifaceted societal and communication issue, which needs approaches that extend beyond the identification of general linguistic patterns through data-driven algorithms. In this research work, we hypothesise that text classification methods are not able to capture the nuances of disinformation and they often ground their decision in superfluous features. Hence, we apply a post-hoc explainability method (SHAP, SHapley Additive exPlanations) to identify spurious elements with high impact on the classification models. Our findings show that non-informative elements (e.g., URLs and emoticons) should be removed and named entities (e.g., Rwanda) should be pseudo-anonymized before training to avoid models' bias and increase their generalization capabilities. We evaluate this methodology with internal dataset and external dataset before and after applying extended data preprocessing and named entity replacement. The results show that our proposal enhances on average the performance of a disinformation classification method with external test data in 65.78% without a significant decrease of the internal test performance.