Abstract

The rapid proliferation of online misinformation poses significant risks to democratic processes and public decision-making. However, existing machine learning and deep learning approaches often rely on large annotated datasets and exhibit limited robustness under severe class imbalance and low-resource conditions, particularly in Spanish-language contexts. To address this, this study proposes an interpretable and robust framework for misinformation detection under such constraints. A unified, linguistically grounded and data-centric pipeline is developed, integrating structured lexical, syntactic, and semantic features with synthetic minority augmentation, class-balanced ensemble learning, autoencoder-based representation learning, and active learning under data scarcity. Importantly, the framework systematically evaluates the interaction between these components within a reproducible experimental setting. Results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves consistent improvements in macro-averaged F1 and minority-class recall compared to baseline models, while reducing performance variance across folds. Ensemble and augmentation strategies provide the most stable configurations, enhancing the detection of underrepresented classes. Moreover, the use of interpretable linguistic features allows predictions to be associated with discourse-level patterns, improving transparency. Consequently, the framework offers a reproducible, computationally efficient, and interpretable solution for misinformation detection in low-resource environments, supporting practical deployment and future multilingual extensions. Importantly, this study provides the first systematic analysis of the interaction between linguistic representations and imbalance mitigation strategies under extreme data scarcity.