Evidence-Based Early Rumor Verification in Social Media

A plethora of studies has been conducted in the past years on rumor verification in micro-blogging platforms. However, most of them exploit the propagation network, i.e., replies and retweets to verify rumors. We argue that first, subjective evidence from the propagation network is insufficient for users to understand, and reason the veracity of the rumor. Second, the full propagation network of the rumor can be sufficient, but for early detection when only part of the network is used, inadequate context for verification can be a major issue. As time is critical for early rumor verification, and sufficient evidence may not be available at the posting time, the objective of this thesis is to verify any tweet as soon as it is posted. Specifically, we are interested in exploiting evidence from Twitter as we believe it will be beneficial to 1) improve the veracity prediction 2) improve the user experience by providing convincing evidence 3) early verification, as waiting for subjective evidence may not be needed. We first aim to retrieve authority Twitter accounts that may help verify the rumor. Second, we aim to retrieve relevant tweets, i.e., tweets stating the same rumor, or tweets stating an evidence that contradicts or supports the rumor along with their propagation networks. Given the retrieved evidence from multiple sources namely evidence from authority accounts, evidence from relevant tweets, and their propagation networks, we intend to learn an effective model for rumor verification, and show rationales behind the decisions it makes.