Qi Zhang

Zhen Guo, Qi Zhang, Xinwei An et al.

Due to various and serious adverse impacts of spreading fake news, it is often known that only people with malicious intent would propagate fake news. However, it is not necessarily true based on social science studies. Distinguishing the types of fake news spreaders based on their intent is critical because it will effectively guide how to intervene to mitigate the spread of fake news with different approaches. To this end, we propose an intent classification framework that can best identify the correct intent of fake news. We will leverage deep reinforcement learning (DRL) that can optimize the structural representation of each tweet by removing noisy words from the input sequence when appending an actor to the long short-term memory (LSTM) intent classifier. Policy gradient DRL model (e.g., REINFORCE) can lead the actor to a higher delayed reward. We also devise a new uncertainty-aware immediate reward using a subjective opinion that can explicitly deal with multidimensional uncertainty for effective decision-making. Via 600K training episodes from a fake news tweets dataset with an annotated intent class, we evaluate the performance of uncertainty-aware reward in DRL. Evaluation results demonstrate that our proposed framework efficiently reduces the number of selected words to maintain a high 95\% multi-class accuracy.

Qi Zhang, Yayi Yang, Chongyang Shi et al.

The rapid growth of social media has caused tremendous effects on information propagation, raising extreme challenges in detecting rumors. Existing rumor detection methods typically exploit the reposting propagation of a rumor candidate for detection by regarding all reposts to a rumor candidate as a temporal sequence and learning semantics representations of the repost sequence. However, extracting informative support from the topological structure of propagation and the influence of reposting authors for debunking rumors is crucial, which generally has not been well addressed by existing methods. In this paper, we organize a claim post in circulation as an adhoc event tree, extract event elements, and convert it to bipartite adhoc event trees in terms of both posts and authors, i.e., author tree and post tree. Accordingly, we propose a novel rumor detection model with hierarchical representation on the bipartite adhoc event trees called BAET. Specifically, we introduce word embedding and feature encoder for the author and post tree, respectively, and design a root-aware attention module to perform node representation. Then we adopt the tree-like RNN model to capture the structural correlations and propose a tree-aware attention module to learn tree representation for the author tree and post tree, respectively. Extensive experimental results on two public Twitter datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of BAET in exploring and exploiting the rumor propagation structure and the superior detection performance of BAET over state-of-the-art baseline methods.

Liang Xiao, Qi Zhang, Chongyang Shi et al.

The proliferation of social media platforms has fueled the rapid dissemination of fake news, posing threats to our real-life society. Existing methods use multimodal data or contextual information to enhance the detection of fake news by analyzing news content and/or its social context. However, these methods often overlook essential textual news content (articles) and heavily rely on sequential modeling and global attention to extract semantic information. These existing methods fail to handle the complex, subtle twists in news articles, such as syntax-semantics mismatches and prior biases, leading to lower performance and potential failure when modalities or social context are missing. To bridge these significant gaps, we propose a novel multi-hop syntax aware fake news detection (MSynFD) method, which incorporates complementary syntax information to deal with subtle twists in fake news. Specifically, we introduce a syntactical dependency graph and design a multi-hop subgraph aggregation mechanism to capture multi-hop syntax. It extends the effect of word perception, leading to effective noise filtering and adjacent relation enhancement. Subsequently, a sequential relative position-aware Transformer is designed to capture the sequential information, together with an elaborate keyword debiasing module to mitigate the prior bias. Extensive experimental results on two public benchmark datasets verify the effectiveness and superior performance of our proposed MSynFD over state-of-the-art detection models.