Rumor Detection with Hierarchical Social Attention Network

Microblogs have become one of the most popular platforms for news sharing. However, due to its openness and lack of supervision, rumors could also be easily posted and propagated on social networks, which could cause huge panic and threat during its propagation. In this paper, we detect rumors by leveraging hierarchical representations at different levels and the social contexts. Specifically, we propose a novel hierarchical neural network combined with social information (HSA-BLSTM). We first build a hierarchical bidirectional long short-term memory model for representation learning. Then, the social contexts are incorporated into the network via attention mechanism, such that important semantic information is introduced to the framework for more robust rumor detection. Experimental results on two real world datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms several state-of-the-arts in both rumor detection and early detection scenarios.