Improving Fake News Detection with a Mixture of Experts: Leveraging Sentiment Analysis and Sarcasm Detection as Core Expert Models

Fake news continues to proliferate, posing an increasing threat to public discourse. The paper proposes a framework of a Mixture of Experts, Sentiment Analysis, and Sarcasm Detection experts for improved fake news detection. This approach captures the emotional cues in the text through a Sentiment Analysis expert, which is based on bidirectional encoder representations from Transformers (BERT) models with sentiment vectors generated using SentiWordNet and Integrated Gradients. It combines a sarcasm detection expert based on BERT, recognizing sarcasm and its type to help classify fake news. By fusing these experts through a Mixture of Experts gateway, subtle linguistic cues often found in fake news are more effectively analyzed, leading to improved accuracy in detecting misinformation. Experimental results are presented as 96% for the Sarcasm expert with the BERT base model and 83% for the Sentiment Analysis expert with the distilled version of the BERT (DistilBERT) base model, proving the effectiveness of the proposed approach in beating traditional methods.