1,859 research outputs found
Interpretable rumor detection in microblogs by attending to user interactions
We address rumor detection by learning to differentiate between the community's response to real and fake claims in microblogs. Existing state-of-the-art models are based on tree models that model conversational trees. However, in social media, a user posting a reply might be replying to the entire thread rather than to a specific user. We propose a post-level attention model (PLAN) to model long distance interactions between tweets with the multi-head attention mechanism in a transformer network. We investigated variants of this model: (1) a structure aware self-attention model (StA-PLAN) that incorporates tree structure information in the transformer network, and (2) a hierarchical token and post-level attention model (StA-HiTPLAN) that learns a sentence representation with token-level self-attention. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to evaluate our models on two rumor detection data sets: the PHEME data set as well as the Twitter15 and Twitter16 data sets. We show that our best models outperform current state-of-the-art models for both data sets. Moreover, the attention mechanism allows us to explain rumor detection predictions at both token-level and post-level
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Conspiracy in the Time of Corona: Automatic detection of Emerging Covid-19 Conspiracy Theories in Social Media and the News
Abstract
Rumors and conspiracy theories thrive in environments of low confi- dence and low trust. Consequently, it is not surprising that ones related to the Covid-19 pandemic are proliferating given the lack of scientific consensus on the virus’s spread and containment, or on the long term social and economic ramifications of the pandemic. Among the stories currently circulating are ones suggesting that the 5G telecommunication network activates the virus, that the pandemic is a hoax perpetrated by a global cabal, that the virus is a bio-weapon released deliberately by the Chinese, or that Bill Gates is using it as cover to launch a broad vaccination program to facilitate a global surveillance regime. While some may be quick to dismiss these stories as having little impact on real-world behavior, recent events including the destruction of cell phone towers, racially fueled attacks against Asian Americans, demonstrations espousing resistance to public health orders, and wide-scale defiance of scientifically sound public mandates such as those to wear masks and practice social distancing, countermand such conclusions. Inspired by narrative theory, we crawl social media sites and news reports and, through the application of automated machine-learning methods, discover the underlying narrative frame- works supporting the generation of rumors and conspiracy theories. We show how the various narrative frameworks fueling these stories rely on the alignment of otherwise disparate domains of knowledge, and consider how they attach to the broader reporting on the pandemic. These alignments and attachments, which can be monitored in near real-time, may be useful for identifying areas in the news that are particularly vulnerable to reinterpretation by conspiracy theorists. Understanding the dynamics of storytelling on social media and the narrative frameworks that provide the generative basis for these stories may also be helpful for devising methods to disrupt their spread
Knowledge-Enhanced Hierarchical Information Correlation Learning for Multi-Modal Rumor Detection
The explosive growth of rumors with text and images on social media platforms
has drawn great attention. Existing studies have made significant contributions
to cross-modal information interaction and fusion, but they fail to fully
explore hierarchical and complex semantic correlation across different modality
content, severely limiting their performance on detecting multi-modal rumor. In
this work, we propose a novel knowledge-enhanced hierarchical information
correlation learning approach (KhiCL) for multi-modal rumor detection by
jointly modeling the basic semantic correlation and high-order
knowledge-enhanced entity correlation. Specifically, KhiCL exploits cross-modal
joint dictionary to transfer the heterogeneous unimodality features into the
common feature space and captures the basic cross-modal semantic consistency
and inconsistency by a cross-modal fusion layer. Moreover, considering the
description of multi-modal content is narrated around entities, KhiCL extracts
visual and textual entities from images and text, and designs a knowledge
relevance reasoning strategy to find the shortest semantic relevant path
between each pair of entities in external knowledge graph, and absorbs all
complementary contextual knowledge of other connected entities in this path for
learning knowledge-enhanced entity representations. Furthermore, KhiCL utilizes
a signed attention mechanism to model the knowledge-enhanced entity consistency
and inconsistency of intra-modality and inter-modality entity pairs by
measuring their corresponding semantic relevant distance. Extensive experiments
have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method
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