Framework for Rumors Detection in Social Media

Abstract

The development of social networks has led the public in general to find easy accessibility for communication with respect to rapid communication to each other at any time. Such services provide the quick transmission of information which is its positive side but its negative side needs to be kept in mind thereby misinformation can spread. Nowadays, in this era of digitalization, the validation of such information has become a real challenge, due to lack of information authentication method. In this paper, we design a framework for the rumors detection from the Facebook events data, which is based on inquiry comments. The proposed Inquiry Comments Detection Model (ICDM) identifies inquiry comments utilizing a rule-based approach which entails regular expressions to categorize the sentences as an inquiry into those starting with an intransitive verb (like is, am, was, will, would and so on) and also those sentences ending with a question mark. We set the threshold value to compare with the ratio of Inquiry to English comments and identify the rumors. We verified the proposed ICDM on labeled data, collected from snopes.com. Our experiments revealed that the proposed method achieved considerably well in comparison to the existing machine learning techniques. The proposed ICDM approach attained better results of 89% precision, 77% recall, and 82% 𝐹-measure. We are of the opinion that our experimental findings of this study will be useful for the worldwide adoption.