NLytics at CheckThat! 2021: Multi-class fake news detection of news articles and domain identification with RoBERTa - A baseline model

The following system description presents our approach to the detection of fake news in texts. The given task has been framed as a multi-class classification problem. The multi-class classification problem is one in which a target variable such as the given class label is associated with every input chunk. In order to assign class labels to the given documents, we opted for RoBERTa (A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach) as a neural network architecture for sequence classification. Starting off with a pre-trained model for language representation we fine-tuned this model on the given classification task with the provided annotated data in supervised training steps.