Predicting Sentence-Level Factuality of News and Bias of Media Outlets

Predicting the factuality of news reporting and bias of media outlets is surely relevant for automated news credibility and fact-checking. While prior work has focused on the veracity of news, we propose a fine-grained reliability analysis of the entire media. Specifically, we study the prediction of sentence-level factuality of news reporting and bias of media outlets, which may explain more accurately the overall reliability of the entire source. We first manually produced a large sentence-level dataset, titled "FactNews", composed of 6,191 sentences expertly annotated according to factuality and media bias definitions from AllSides. As a result, baseline models for sentence-level factuality prediction were presented by fine-tuning BERT. Finally, due to the severity of fake news and political polarization in Brazil, both dataset and baseline were proposed for Portuguese. However, our approach may be applied to any other language.