Emotion Cognizance Improves Fake News Identification.

Identifying misinformation is increasingly being recognized as an important computational task with high potential social impact. In this paper, we consider leveraging the affective character of news articles for fake news identification and present evidence that emotion cognizant representations are significantly more suited for the task. We outline a technique to leverage emotion intensity lexicons to develop emotionized text representations, and evaluate the utility of such a representation for fake news identification in various supervised and unsupervised scenarios. The consistent and significant empirical gains that we observe over a range of technique types and parameter settings establish the utility of the emotional information in news articles, an often overlooked aspect, for the task of misinformation identification.