DeMis: Data-Efficient Misinformation Detection Using Reinforcement Learning

Deep learning approaches are state-of-the-art for many natural language processing tasks, including misinformation detection. To train deep learning algorithms effectively, a large amount of training data is essential. Unfortunately, while unlabeled data are abundant, manually-labeled data are lacking for misinformation detection. In this paper, we propose DeMis, a novel reinforcement learning (RL) framework to detect misinformation on Twitter in a resource-constrained environment, i.e. limited labeled data. The main novelties result from (1) using reinforcement learning to identify high-quality weak labels to use with manually-labeled data to jointly train a classifier, and (2) using fact-checked claims to construct weak labels from unlabeled tweets. We empirically show the strength of this approach over the current state of the art and demonstrate its effectiveness in a low-resourced environment, outperforming other models by up to 8% (F1 score). We also find that our method is more robust to heavily imbalanced data. Finally, we publish a package containing code, trained models, and labeled data sets.