Extreme Gradient Boosting for Cyberpropaganda Detection

Propaganda, defamation, abuse, insults, disinformation and fake news are not new phenomena and have been around for several decades. However, with the advent of the Internet and social networks, their magnitude has increased and the damage caused to individuals and corporate entities is becoming increasingly greater, even irreparable. In this paper, we tackle the detection of text-based cyberpropaganda using Machine Learning and NLP techniques. We use the eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) algorithm for learning and detection, in tandem with Bag-of-Words (BoW) and Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) for text vectorization. We highlight the contribution of gradient boosting and regularization mechanisms in the performance of the explored model.