Curriculum Contrastive Learning for Fake News Detection

Jiachen Ma, Yong Liu, Meng Liu, Meng Han

Abstract: Due to the rapid spread of fake news on social media, society and economy have been negatively affected in many ways. How to effectively identify fake news is a challenging problem that has received great attention from academic and industry. Existing deep learning methods for fake news detection require a large amount of labeled data to train the model, but obtaining labeled data is a time-consuming and labor-intensive process. To extract useful information from a large amount of unlabeled data, some contrastive learning methods for fake news detection are proposed. However, existing contrastive learning methods only randomly sample negative samples at different training stages, resulting in the role of negative samples not being fully played. Intuitively, increasing the contrastive difficulty of negative samples gradually in a way similar to human learning will contribute to improve the performance of the model. Inspired by the idea of curriculum learning, we propose a curriculum contrastive model (CCFD) for fake news detection which automatically select and train negative samples with different difficulty at different training stages. Furthermore, we also propose three new augmentation methods which consider the importance of edges and node attributes in the propagation structure to obtain more effective positive samples. The experimental results on three public datasets show that our model CCFD outperforms the existing state-of-the-art models for fake news detection.