Dual Co-Attention-Based Multi-Feature Fusion Method for Rumor Detection

Abstract

Social media has become more popular these days due to widely used instant messaging. Nevertheless, rumor propagation on social media has become an increasingly important issue. The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of various features in social media on rumor detection, propose a dual co-attention-based multi-feature fusion method for rumor detection, and explore the detection capability of the proposed method in early rumor detection tasks. The proposed BERT-based Dual Co-attention Neural Network (BDCoNN) method for rumor detection, which uses BERT for word embedding. It simultaneously integrates features from three sources: publishing user profiles, source tweets, and comments. In the BDCoNN method, user discrete features and identity descriptors in user profiles are extracted using a one-dimensional convolutional neural network (CNN) and TextCNN, respectively. The bidirectional gate recurrent unit network (BiGRU) with a hierarchical attention mechanism is used to learn the hidden layer representation of tweet sequence and comment sequence. A dual collaborative attention mechanism is used to explore the correlation among publishing user profiles, tweet content, and comments. Then the feature vector is fed into classifier to identify the implicit differences between rumor spreaders and non-rumor spreaders. In this study, we conducted several experiments on the Weibo and CED datasets collected from microblog. The results show that the proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art performance compared with baseline methods, which is 5.2% and 5% higher than the dEFEND. The F1 value is increased by 4.4% and 4%, respectively. In addition, this paper conducts research on early rumor detection tasks, which verifies the proposed method detects rumors more quickly and accurately than competitors.