Rumor detection methodology based on sentiment analysis and the transformer model with decision-level fusion

Abstract

The use of transformer models in natural language processing (NLP) has gained significant attention in recent years due to their exceptional performance in various language tasks. This paper explores the application of transformer models in rumor detection, the relevant research on rumor detection, the use of transformer models, and the techniques used to boost the models performance. Ultimately, the purpose of this paper is to provide insight into the potential of transformer models in detecting rumors on social media. Unlike other rumor-detecting models, the author adds a sentiment analysis model as a supplement to rumor detection. Also, to address the issue of insufficient information in early-stage comments on rumors, this paper proposes a decision-level fusion method before the output layer, which effectively utilizes information from different sources and minimizes the negative impact of insufficient data sources. The early-stage rumor detection accuracy of the model is greatly enhanced by this method, therefore, the articles main contributions can be regarded as follows: First, this paper proposes a combination of an aspect level text sentiment analysis method according to syntactic features, gated recurrent units, and a self-attention mechanism. Experimental findings demonstrate that, compared to the original model without taking the sentiment analysis method into account, the proposed network model has advantages in accuracy and Macro F1 evaluation indexes. Second, a cross-text rumor-detecting method based on Decision-level fusion is proposed. Its advantage is that when the cross-text data source is incomplete and a certain text is missing, another text can be used to continue the analysis. Experimental findings show the effectiveness of this method in improving the accuracy of emotion recognition by integrating data from different modes. Third, a comparison is conducted between the performance of the Transformer-sentiment model and other related models, Text-CNN, Bi-LSTM, etc. The result shows that this integrated Transformer-sentiment model can not only solve the rumor detection tasks at higher accuracy, but can also overcome the shortcomings of the lack of datasets, which means that the model is more robust, and is able to detect rumors at the early stage of the rumor spreading process.