Rumor Detection on Social Media via Fused Semantic Information and a Propagation Heterogeneous Graph

Abstract

Social media had a revolutionary impact because it provides an ideal platform for share information; however, it also leads to the publication and spreading of rumors. Existing rumor detection methods have relied on finding cues from only user-generated content, user profiles, or the structures of wide propagation. However, the previous works have ignored the organic combination of wide dispersion structures in rumor detection and text semantics. To this end, we propose KZWANG, a framework for rumor detection that provides sufficient domain knowledge to classify rumors accurately, and semantic information and a propagation heterogeneous graph are symmetry fused together. We utilize an attention mechanism to learn a semantic representation of text and introduce a GCN to capture the global and local relationships among all the source microblogs, reposts, and users. An organic combination of text semantics and propagating heterogeneous graphs is then used to train a rumor detection classifier. Experiments on Sina Weibo, Twitter15, and Twitter16 rumor detection datasets demonstrate the proposed model’s superiority over baseline methods. We also conduct an ablation study to understand the relative contributions of the various aspects of the method we proposed.