The truth is significantly hampered by massive rumors that spread along with
breaking news or popular topics. Since there is sufficient corpus gathered from
the same domain for model training, existing rumor detection algorithms show
promising performance on yesterday's news. However, due to a lack of training
data and prior expert knowledge, they are poor at spotting rumors concerning
unforeseen events, especially those propagated in different languages (i.e.,
low-resource regimes). In this paper, we propose a unified contrastive transfer
framework to detect rumors by adapting the features learned from well-resourced
rumor data to that of the low-resourced. More specifically, we first represent
rumor circulated on social media as an undirected topology, and then train a
Multi-scale Graph Convolutional Network via a unified contrastive paradigm. Our
model explicitly breaks the barriers of the domain and/or language issues, via
language alignment and a novel domain-adaptive contrastive learning mechanism.
To enhance the representation learning from a small set of target events, we
reveal that rumor-indicative signal is closely correlated with the uniformity
of the distribution of these events. We design a target-wise contrastive
training mechanism with three data augmentation strategies, capable of unifying
the representations by distinguishing target events. Extensive experiments
conducted on four low-resource datasets collected from real-world microblog
platforms demonstrate that our framework achieves much better performance than
state-of-the-art methods and exhibits a superior capacity for detecting rumors
at early stages.Comment: A significant extension of the first contrastive approach for
low-resource rumor detection (arXiv:2204.08143