Exploiting User Comments for Early Detection of Fake News Prior to Users' Commenting
This addresses the problem of timely and accurate fake news detection on social media, offering an incremental improvement over prior approaches.
The paper tackles the accuracy-timeliness dilemma in fake news detection by proposing CAS-FEND, a method that transfers knowledge from comment-aware models to content-only ones, achieving superior performance with 1/4 of the comments compared to existing methods.
Both accuracy and timeliness are key factors in detecting fake news on social media. However, most existing methods encounter an accuracy-timeliness dilemma: Content-only methods guarantee timeliness but perform moderately because of limited available information, while social con-text-based ones generally perform better but inevitably lead to latency because of social context accumulation needs. To break such a dilemma, a feasible but not well-studied solution is to leverage social contexts (e.g., comments) from historical news for training a detection model and apply it to newly emerging news without social contexts. This requires the model to (1) sufficiently learn helpful knowledge from social contexts, and (2) be well compatible with situations that social contexts are available or not. To achieve this goal, we propose to absorb and parameterize useful knowledge from comments in historical news and then inject it into a content-only detection model. Specifically, we design the Comments ASsisted FakE News Detection method (CAS-FEND), which transfers useful knowledge from a comment-aware teacher model to a content-only student model and detects newly emerging news with the student model. Experiments show that the CAS-FEND student model outperforms all content-only methods and even comment-aware ones with 1/4 comments as inputs, demonstrating its superiority for early detection.