Rumour Detection Based on Graph Convolutional Neural Net

Rumor detection is an important research topic in social networks, and lots of rumor detection models are proposed in recent years. For the rumor detection task, structural information in a conversation can be used to extract effective features. However, many existing rumor detection models focus on local structural features while the global structural features between the source tweet and its replies are not effectively used. To make full use of global structural features and content information, we propose Source-Replies relation Graph (SR-graph) for each conversation, in which every node denotes a tweet, its node feature is weighted word vectors, and edges denote the interaction between tweets. Based on SR-graphs, we propose an Ensemble Graph Convolutional Neural Net with a Nodes Proportion Allocation Mechanism (EGCN) for the rumor detection task. In experiments, we first verify that the extracted structural features are effective, and then we show the effects of different word-embedding dimensions on multiple test indices. Moreover, we show that our proposed EGCN model is comparable or even better than the current state-of-art machine learning models.