Multimodal Disentangled Domain Adaption for Social Media Event Rumor Detection

With the rapid development of social media and the increasing scale of social media data, the rumor detection on social media platforms has become vitally crucial. The key challenges for rumor detection on social media platforms are how to identify rumors deeply entangled with the specific content and how to detect rumors for the emerging social media events without labeled data. Unfortunately, most of the existing approaches can hardly handle these challenges since they tend to learn event-specific features and cannot transfer the learned features to newly emerged events. To tackle the above challenges, we propose a novel Multimodal Disentangled Domain Adaption (MDDA) method which can derive event-invariant features and thus benefit the detection of rumors on emerging social media events. The model consists of two components: the multimodal disentangled representation learning and the unsupervised domain adaptation. The multimodal disentangled representation learning is responsible for disentangling the multimedia posts into the content features and the rumor style features, and removing the content-specific features from post representation. The unsupervised domain adaptation aims to filter out the event-specific features and keep shared rumor style features among events. Based on the final event-invariant rumor style features, we train a robust social media rumor detector that can transfer knowledge from source events to the target events, which can perform well on the newly emerged events. Extensive experiments on two Twitter benchmark datasets demonstrate that our rumor detection model outperforms state-of-the-art methods.