Exposing the Vulnerabilities of Deep Learning Models in News Classification

News websites need to divide their articles into categories that make it easier for readers to find news of their interest. Recent deep-learning models have excelled in this news classification task. Despite the tremendous success of deep learning models in NLP-related tasks, it is vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which lead to misclassification of the news category. An adversarial text is generated by changing a few words or characters in a way that retains the overall semantic similarity of news for a human reader but deceives the machine into giving inaccurate predictions. This paper presents the vulnerability in news classification by generating adversarial text using various state-of-the-art attack algorithms. We have compared and analyzed the behavior of different models, including the powerful transformer model, BERT, and the widely used Word-CNN and LSTM models trained on AG news classification dataset. We have evaluated the potential results by calculating Attack Success Rates (ASR) for each model. The results show that it is possible to automatically bypass News topic classification mechanisms, resulting in repercussions for current policy measures.