Sentiment Gradient - Improving Sentiment Analysis with Entropy Increase

Information sharing on the Web has also led to the rise and spread of fake news. Considering that fake information is generally written to trigger stronger feelings from the readers than simple facts, sentiment analysis has been widely used to detect fake news. Nevertheless, sarcasm, irony, and even jokes use similarwritten styles, making the distinction between fake and fact harder to catch automatically. We propose a new fake news Classifier that considers a set of language attributes and the gradient of sentiments contained in a message. Sentiment analysis approaches are based on labelling news with a unique value that shrinks the entire message to a single feeling. We take a broader view of a message’s sentiment representation, trying to unravel the gradient of sentiments a message may bring. We tested our approach using two datasets containing texts written in Portuguese: a public one and another we created with more up-to-date news scrapped from the Internet. Although we believe our approach is general, we tested for the Portuguese language. Our results show that the sentiment gradient positively impacts the fake news classification performance with statistical significance. The F-Measure reached 94 %, with our approach surpassing available ones (with a p-value less than 0.05 for our results).