Emotion-guided Cross-domain Fake News Detection using Adversarial Domain Adaptation

Recent works on fake news detection have shown the efficacy of using emotions as a feature or emotions-based features for improved performance. However, the impact of these emotion-guided features for fake news detection in cross-domain settings, where we face the problem of domain shift, is still largely unexplored. In this work, we evaluate the impact of emotion-guided features for cross-domain fake news detection, and further propose an emotion-guided, domain-adaptive approach using adversarial learning. We prove the efficacy of emotion-guided models in cross-domain settings for various combinations of source and target datasets from FakeNewsAMT, Celeb, Politifact and Gossipcop datasets.Comment: Accepted as a Short Paper in the 19th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON) 202

Exploring Roles of Emotion in Fake News Detection

Detecting fake news is becoming widely acknowledged as a critical activity with significant implications for social impact. As fake news tends to evoke high-activating emotions from audiences, the role of emotions in identifying fake news is still under-explored. Existing research made efforts in examining effective representations of emotions conveyed in the news content to help discern the veracity of the news. However, the aroused emotions from the audience are usually ignored. This paper first demonstrates effective representations of emotions within both news content and users’ comments. Furthermore, we propose an emotion-aware fake news detection framework that seamlessly incorporates emotion features to enhance the accuracy of identifying fake news. Future work will include thorough experiments to prove that the proposed framework with the emotions expressed in news and users’ comments improves fake news detection performance

MUFFLE: Multi-Modal Fake News Influence Estimator on Twitter

To alleviate the impact of fake news on our society, predicting the popularity of fake news posts on social media is a crucial problem worthy of study. However, most related studies on fake news emphasize detection only. In this paper, we focus on the issue of fake news influence prediction, i.e., inferring how popular a fake news post might become on social platforms. To achieve our goal, we propose a comprehensive framework, MUFFLE, which captures multi-modal dynamics by encoding the representation of news-related social networks, user characteristics, and content in text. The attention mechanism developed in the model can provide explainability for social or psychological analysis. To examine the effectiveness of MUFFLE, we conducted extensive experiments on real-world datasets. The experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms both state-of-the-art methods of popularity prediction and machine-based baselines in top-k NDCG and hit rate. Through the experiments, we also analyze the feature importance for predicting fake news influence via the explainability provided by MUFFLE

SceneFND: Multimodal fake news detection by modelling scene context information

Fake news is a threat for the society and can create a lot of confusion to people regarding what is true and what not. Fake news usually contain manipulated content, such as text or images that attract the interest of the readers with the aim to convince them on their truthfulness. In this article, we propose SceneFND (Scene Fake News Detection), a system that combines textual, contextual scene and visual representation to address the problem of multimodal fake news detection. The textual representation is based on word embeddings that are passed into a bidirectional long short-term memory network. Both the contextual scene and the visual representations are based on the images contained in the news post. The place, weather and season scenes are extracted from the image. Our statistical analysis on the scenes showed that there are statistically significant differences regarding their frequency in fake and real news. In addition, our experimental results on two real world datasets show that the integration of the contextual scenes is effective for fake news detection. In particular, SceneFND improved the performance of the textual baseline by 3.48% in PolitiFact and by 3.32% in GossipCop datasets. Finally, we show the suitability of the scene information for the task and present some examples to explain its effectiveness in capturing the relevance between images and text

A Machine Learning Technique for Detection of Social Media Fake News

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Misinformation Retrieval

This work introduces the task of misinformation retrieval, identifying all documents containing misinformation for a given topic, and proposes a pipeline for misinformation retrieval on tweets. As part of the work, I curated 50 COVID-19 misinformation topics used in the TREC 2020 Health Misinformation track. In addition, I annotated a test set of tweets using the TREC COVID-19 misinformation on social media. Misinformation on social media has proven highly detrimental to communities by encouraging harmful and often life-threatening behavior. The chaos caused by COVID-19 misinformation has created an urgent need for misinformation detection methods to moderate social media platforms. Drawing upon previous work in misinformation detection and the TREC 2020 Health Misinformation Track, I focused on the task of misinformation retrieval on social media. I extended the COVID-Lies data set created to detect COVID-19 misinformation in tweets by rephrasing the misconceptions accompanying each tweet. I also created 50 COVID-19 related topics for the TREC 2020 Health Misinformation track used for evaluation purposes. I propose a natural language inference (NLI) based approach using CT-BERT to identify tweets that contradict a given fact, used to score documents utilizing the model’s classification probability. The model was trained using a combination of NLI data sets to find the best approach. Tweets were labeled for the TREC 2020 Health Misinformation Track topics to create a test set on which the best model achieves an AUC of 0.81. I conducted several experiments which show that domain adaptation significantly improved the ability to detect misinformation. A combination of a large NLI corpus, such as SNLI, and an in-domain, such as the COVID-Lies, data set achieves the best performance on our test set. The pipelines retrieved and ranked tweets based on misinformation for 7 TREC topics from the COVID-19 Twitter stream. The top 20 unique tweets were analyzed using Precision@20 to evaluate the pipeline