Identifying Political Bias in Arabic News Articles

Abstract

A comprehensive framework was developed to detect political bias in Arabic news articles, with a case study focusing on media reporting of the Palestinian issue. The methodology integrates MARBERT contextual embeddings with classical and deep learning classifiers, including SVM, Logistic Regression, Random Forest, and LSTM. The scalability of data processing was ensured through Apache Spark for potential real-time deployment. Experimental results showed that fine-tuned MARBERT embeddings combined with LSTM achieved the highest classification accuracy of 0.87, along with notable improvements in F1-scores across the pro, against, and neutral categories. These findings highlight the effectiveness of domain-specific fine-tuning of transformer models for political bias classification. The study also addressed class imbalance using SMOTE and class weighting strategies, and assessed feature robustness using multiple vectorization techniques.

Resources

Details