Exploiting user network topology and comment semantic for accurate rumour stance recognition on social media

Abstract

Online social media (OSM) has become a hotbed for the rapid dissemination of disinformation or fake news. In order to recognise fake news and guide users of OSM, we focus on the stance recognition of comments, posted on OSM on the fake news-related users. In this article, we propose a framework for recognition of rumour stances (we set four categories –‘agree’, ‘disagree’, ‘neutral’ and ‘query’), combining network topology and comment semantic enhancement (CSE). We first construct a vector matrix of comments via a novel optimised term frequency–inverse document frequency (OTI). To better recognise stances, we employ another vector matrix with novel or special attributes which comprises the network topology of the OSM users derived from the random walk with restart (RWR) method. In addition, we set a weight parameter for each word in the comments to enhance comment semantic representation, where these parameters are tuned based on sentiment score, topology features and question format words. These vector matrices are optimised and combined into an integrated matrix whose transpose matrix is fed into a neural network (NN) for final rumour stance recognition. Experimental evaluations show that our approach achieves a high precision of 93.96% and F1-score of 92.02% which are superior to baselines and other existing methods.