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Birds of a feather check together : leveraging homophily for sequential rumour detection

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Lathiya, Shital, Dhobi, J. S., Zubiaga, Arkaitz, Liakata, Maria and Procter, Rob (2020) Birds of a feather check together : leveraging homophily for sequential rumour detection. Online Social Networks and Media, 19 . 100097. doi:10.1016/j.osnem.2020.100097 ISSN 2468-6964.

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.osnem.2020.100097

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Abstract

As breaking news unfolds, social media has become the go-to platform to learn about the latest updates from journalists and eyewitnesses on the ground. The fact that anybody can post content in social media during these breaking news leads to posting and diffusion of unverified rumours, which in turn produces uncertainty and increases anxiety. Given the scale of social media contents, automation is key for effective detection of these rumours. In this paper we introduce a novel approach to rumour detection that learns from the sequential dynamics of reporting during breaking news in social media to detect rumours in new stories. Using five Twitter datasets collected during breaking news stories, we experiment with Conditional Random Fields as a sequential classifier that leverages context learnt during an event for rumour detection, which we compare with the state-of-the-art rumour detection system as well as other baselines. In contrast to existing work, our classifier does not need to observe tweets querying a piece of information to deem it a rumour, but instead we detect rumours from the tweet alone by exploiting context learnt during the event. Further, we experiment with homophily as a predictive feature for detecting rumours, i.e. setting forth the hypothesis that a user will be more likely to post a rumour if they follow users who posted or spread rumours in the past. Our classifier achieves state-of-the-art performance, beating competitive baselines as well as outperforming our best baseline with nearly 40% improvement in terms of F1 score. Our research proves the effectiveness of the consideration of the sequential nature of social media data and the usefulness of homophily as a feature for rumour detection.

Item Type: Journal Article
Subjects: H Social Sciences > HM Sociology
T Technology > T Technology (General)
Divisions: Faculty of Science, Engineering and Medicine > Science > Computer Science
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): Social media, Rumor, Rumor in mass media
Journal or Publication Title: Online Social Networks and Media
Publisher: Elsevier
ISSN: 2468-6964
Official Date: September 2020
Dates:
DateEvent
September 2020Published
8 September 2020Available
2 September 2020Accepted
Volume: 19
Article Number: 100097
DOI: 10.1016/j.osnem.2020.100097
Status: Peer Reviewed
Publication Status: Published
Access rights to Published version: Restricted or Subscription Access
Date of first compliant deposit: 30 September 2020
Date of first compliant Open Access: 8 September 2022
RIOXX Funder/Project Grant:
Project/Grant IDRIOXX Funder NameFunder ID
611233Seventh Framework Programmehttp://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100011102

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