Fine-Tune Longformer for Jointly Predicting Rumor Stance and Veracity

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multi-task learning framework based on Longformer to jointly predict rumor stance and veracity in social media discussions, improving accuracy over previous methods.

Contribution

It proposes a novel joint model that leverages Longformer for multi-turn conversation modeling to enhance rumor stance and veracity prediction.

Findings

Outperforms previous methods on SemEval 2019 dataset

Effectively models multi-turn conversations for stance detection

Improves rumor veracity prediction accuracy

Abstract

Increased usage of social media caused the popularity of news and events which are not even verified, resulting in spread of rumors allover the web. Due to widely available social media platforms and increased usage caused the data to be available in huge amounts.The manual methods to process such large data is costly and time-taking, so there has been an increased attention to process and verify such content automatically for the presence of rumors. A lot of research studies reveal that to identify the stances of posts in the discussion thread of such events and news is an important preceding step before identify the rumor veracity. In this paper,we propose a multi-task learning framework for jointly predicting rumor stance and veracity on the dataset released at SemEval 2019 RumorEval: Determining rumor veracity and support for rumors(SemEval 2019 Task 7), which includes social media rumors stem from a variety of breaking news stories from Reddit as well as Twit-ter. Our framework consists of two parts: a) The bottom part of our framework classifies the stance for each post in the conversation thread discussing a rumor via modelling the multi-turn conversation and make each post aware of its neighboring posts. b) The upper part predicts the rumor veracity of the conversation thread with stance evolution obtained from the bottom part. Experimental results on SemEval 2019 Task 7 dataset show that our method outperforms previous methods on both rumor stance classification and veracity prediction