A systematic review of automated hyperpartisan news detection

Abstract

Hyperpartisan news consists of articles with strong biases that support specific political parties. The spread of such news increases polarization among readers, which threatens social unity and democratic stability. Automated tools can help identify hyperpartisan news in the daily flood of articles, offering a way to tackle these problems. With recent advances in machine learning and deep learning, there are now more methods available to address this issue. This literature review collects and organizes the different methods used in previous studies on hyperpartisan news detection. Using the PRISMA methodology, we reviewed and systematized approaches and datasets from 81 articles published from January 2015 to 2024. Our analysis includes several steps: differentiating hyperpartisan news detection from similar tasks, identifying text sources, labeling methods, and evaluating models. We found some key gaps: there is no clear definition of hyperpartisanship in Computer Science, and most datasets are in English, highlighting the need for more datasets in minority languages. Moreover, the tendency is that deep learning models perform better than traditional machine learning, but Large Language Models’ (LLMs) capacities in this domain have been limitedly studied. This paper is the first to systematically review hyperpartisan news detection, laying a solid groundwork for future research.