Debunking Rumors on Twitter with Tree Transformer

Jing Ma, Wei Gao

Abstract: Rumors are manufactured with no respect for accuracy, but can circulate quickly and widely by “word-of-post” through social media conversations. Conversation tree encodes important information indicative of the credibility of rumor. Existing conversation-based techniques for rumor detection either just strictly follow tree edges or treat all the posts fully-connected during feature learning. In this paper, we propose a novel detection model based on tree transformer to better utilize user interactions in the dialogue where post-level self-attention plays the key role for aggregating the intra-/inter-subtree stances. Experimental results on the TWITTER and PHEME datasets show that the proposed approach consistently improves rumor detection performance.