This repository contains all code used in our submission for Task 3a in 2021's CheckThatLab!. Unfortunately, we are not allowed to share the dataset used due to legal reasons, but we wanted to share our method nonetheless. We will add a link to the conference and paper once they are available.
We present our submission to the CLEF 2021 CheckThat! challenge. More specifically, we took part in Task 3a, Multi-class fake news detection of news articles. The conceptual idea of our work is that (a) transformer-based approaches represent a strong foundation for a broad range of NLP tasks including fake news detection, and that (b) compressing the original input documents into some form of automatically generated summary before classifying them is a promising direction. The official results indicate that this is indeed an interesting direction to explore. They also confirm that oversampling to address the class imbalance was effective to further improve the results.