Graph Representation Learning with Massive Unlabeled Data for Rumor Detection

Abstract

With the development of social media, rumors spread quickly, cause great harm to society and economy. Thereby, many effective rumor detection methods have been developed, among which the rumor propagation structure learning based methods are particularly effective compared to other methods. However, the existing methods still suffer from many issues including the difficulty to obtain large-scale labeled rumor datasets, which leads to the low generalization ability and the performance degeneration on new events since rumors are time-critical and usually appear with hot topics or newly emergent events. In order to solve the above problems, in this study, we used large-scale unlabeled topic datasets crawled from the social media platform Weibo and Twitter with claim propagation structure to improve the semantic learning ability of a graph reprentation learing model on various topics. We use three typical graph self-supervised methods, InfoGraph, JOAO and GraphMAE in two commonly used training strategies, to verify the performance of general graph semi-supervised methods in rumor detection tasks. In addition, for alleviating the time and topic difference between unlabeled topic data and rumor data, we also collected a rumor dataset covering a variety of topics over a decade (10-year ago from 2022) from the Weibo rumor-refuting platform. Our experiments show that these general graph self-supervised learning methods outperform previous methods specifically designed for rumor detection tasks and achieve good performance under few-shot conditions, demonstrating the better generalization ability with the help of our massive unlabeled topic dataset.