A Rumor Detection Method Based on Multimodal Feature Fusion by a Joining Aggregation Structure

Abstract

Online rumors spread rapidly through social media, which is a great threat to public safety. Existing solutions are mainly based on content features or propagation structures for rumor detection. However, due to the variety of strategies in creating rumors, only considering certain features cannot achieve good enough detection results. In addition, existing works only consider the rumor propagation structure and ignore the aggregation structures of rumors, which cannot provide enough discriminative features (especially in the early days of rumors, when the structure of the propagation is incomplete). To solve these problems, this paper proposes a rumor detection method with multimodal feature fusion and enhances the feature representation of the rumor propagation network by adding aggregation features. More specifically, we built a graph model of the propagation structure as well as the aggregation structure. Next, by utilizing the BERT pre-training model and the bidirectional graph convolutional network, we captured the features of text content, propagation structure, and aggregation structure, respectively. Finally, the multimodal features were aggregated based on the attention mechanism, and the final result was obtained through the MLP classifier. Experiments on real-world datasets show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.