An Event Correlation Filtering Method for Fake News Detection

Li, Hao; Wang, Huan; Informatics, Guanghua Liu College of; University, Huazhong Agricultural; Science, Department of Computer; Engineering,; Buffalo, University at; York, The State University of New

Nowadays, social network platforms have been the prime source for people to experience news and events due to their capacities to spread information rapidly, which inevitably provides a fertile ground for the dissemination of fake news. Thus, it is significant to detect fake news otherwise it could cause public misleading and panic. Existing deep learning models have achieved great progress to tackle the problem of fake news detection. However, training an effective deep learning model usually requires a large amount of labeled news, while it is expensive and time-consuming to provide sufficient labeled news in actual applications. To improve the detection performance of fake news, we take advantage of the event correlations of news and propose an event correlation filtering method (ECFM) for fake news detection, mainly consisting of the news characterizer, the pseudo label annotator, the event credibility updater, and the news entropy selector. The news characterizer is responsible for extracting textual features from news, which cooperates with the pseudo label annotator to assign pseudo labels for unlabeled news by fully exploiting the event correlations of news. In addition, the event credibility updater employs adaptive Kalman filter to weaken the credibility fluctuations of events. To further improve the detection performance, the news entropy selector automatically discovers high-quality samples from pseudo labeled news by quantifying their news entropy. Finally, ECFM is proposed to integrate them to detect fake news in an event correlation filtering manner. Extensive experiments prove that the explainable introduction of the event correlations of news is beneficial to improve the detection performance of fake news.