Rumor detection using dual embeddings and text-based graph convolutional network

Abstract

Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook have gradually become vital for communication and information exchange. However, this often leads to the spread of unreliable or false information, such as harmful rumors. Currently, graph convolutional networks (GCNs), particularly TextGCN, have shown promise in text classification tasks, including rumor detection. Their success is due to their ability to identify structural patterns in rumors and effectively use neighborhood information. We present a novel rumor detection model using TextGCN, which utilizes a word-document graph to represent rumor texts. This model uses dual embedding from two pre-trained transformer models: generative pre-trained transformers (GPT) and bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT). These embeddings serve as node representations within the graph, enhancing rumor detection. Combining these deep neural networks effectively extracts significant contextual features from rumors. This graph undergoes convolution, and through graph-based learning, the model detects a rumor. We evaluated our model using publicly available rumor datasets, such as PHEME, Twitter15, and Twitter16. It achieved 88.64% accuracy on the PHEME dataset, surpassing similar models, and performed well on Twitter15 and Twitter16 with accuracies of 81.98% and 83.41%, respectively.