CIMTDetect: A Community Infused Matrix-Tensor Coupled Factorization Based Method for Fake News Detection

Detecting whether a news article is fake or genuine is a crucial task in today's digital world where it's easy to create and spread a misleading news article. This is especially true of news stories shared on social media since they don't undergo any stringent journalistic checking associated with main stream media. Given the inherent human tendency to share information with their social connections at a mouse-click, fake news articles masquerading as real ones, tend to spread widely and virally. The presence of echo chambers (people sharing same beliefs) in social networks, only adds to this problem of wide-spread existence of fake news on social media. In this paper, we tackle the problem of fake news detection from social media by exploiting the very presence of echo chambers that exist within the social network of users to obtain an efficient and informative latent representation of the news article. By modeling the echo-chambers as closely-connected communities within the social network, we represent a news article as a 3-mode tensor of the structure - and propose a tensor factorization based method to encode the news article in a latent embedding space preserving the community structure. We also propose an extension of the above method, which jointly models the community and content information of the news article through a coupled matrix-tensor factorization framework. We empirically demonstrate the efficacy of our method for the task of Fake News Detection over two real-world datasets. Further, we validate the generalization of the resulting embeddings over two other auxiliary tasks, namely: \textbf{1)} News Cohort Analysis and \textbf{2)} Collaborative News Recommendation. Our proposed method outperforms appropriate baselines for both the tasks, establishing its generalization.Comment: Presented at ASONAM'1

Extracting Implicit Social Relation for Social Recommendation Techniques in User Rating Prediction

Recommendation plays an increasingly important role in our daily lives. Recommender systems automatically suggest items to users that might be interesting for them. Recent studies illustrate that incorporating social trust in Matrix Factorization methods demonstrably improves accuracy of rating prediction. Such approaches mainly use the trust scores explicitly expressed by users. However, it is often challenging to have users provide explicit trust scores of each other. There exist quite a few works, which propose Trust Metrics to compute and predict trust scores between users based on their interactions. In this paper, first we present how social relation can be extracted from users' ratings to items by describing Hellinger distance between users in recommender systems. Then, we propose to incorporate the predicted trust scores into social matrix factorization models. By analyzing social relation extraction from three well-known real-world datasets, which both: trust and recommendation data available, we conclude that using the implicit social relation in social recommendation techniques has almost the same performance compared to the actual trust scores explicitly expressed by users. Hence, we build our method, called Hell-TrustSVD, on top of the state-of-the-art social recommendation technique to incorporate both the extracted implicit social relations and ratings given by users on the prediction of items for an active user. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to extend TrustSVD with extracted social trust information. The experimental results support the idea of employing implicit trust into matrix factorization whenever explicit trust is not available, can perform much better than the state-of-the-art approaches in user rating prediction