Indonesian Fake News Classification Using Transfer Learning in CNN and LSTM

Fake news spreads quickly and is challenging to stop due to the ease of accessing and sharing information online. Deep learning techniques are a method that can be used to identify fake news quickly and accurately. The types of neural networks commonly utilized in deep learning architectures include Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), which can perform well when managing the task of classifying fake news, according to several pertinent studies. Regarding handling instances of Indonesian fake news classification, this study compares how well the CNN and LSTM models perform. However, given that Indonesian is a low-resource language with scant documentation, it is challenging to build an adequate data set. At the same time, the CNN and LSTM classification models require significant training data. We proposed a transfer learning method by combining two classification models with a pre-trained IndoBERT language model. 1340 news text data were used, including 643 actual news texts from CNN Indonesia, Liputan6, and Detik and 697 fake news texts from TurnBackHoax. As a result, the performance of the combination of the LSTM classification model with IndoBERT outperformed that of the CNN classification model with IndoBERT, which only produced an accuracy of 92.91%, down by 6%, and was able to produce an accuracy of up to 97.76%, an increase of 4.8% from before. Furthermore, the results show that the LSTM classification model outperforms the CNN classification model in capturing the representation created by IndoBERT. Additionally, these insights may serve as a basis for future research on identifying fake news in Indonesia, helping to improve methods for combatting misinformation in Indonesia.