Unsupervised Fake News Detection on Social Media: A Generative Approach

Authors

  • Shuo Yang Shanghai Jiao Tong University
  • Kai Shu Arizona State University
  • Suhang Wang Penn State University
  • Renjie Gu Shanghai Jiao Tong University
  • Fan Wu Shanghai Jiao Tong University
  • Huan Liu Arizona State University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v33i01.33015644

Abstract

Social media has become one of the main channels for people to access and consume news, due to the rapidness and low cost of news dissemination on it. However, such properties of social media also make it a hotbed of fake news dissemination, bringing negative impacts on both individuals and society. Therefore, detecting fake news has become a crucial problem attracting tremendous research effort. Most existing methods of fake news detection are supervised, which require an extensive amount of time and labor to build a reliably annotated dataset. In search of an alternative, in this paper, we investigate if we could detect fake news in an unsupervised manner. We treat truths of news and users’ credibility as latent random variables, and exploit users’ engagements on social media to identify their opinions towards the authenticity of news. We leverage a Bayesian network model to capture the conditional dependencies among the truths of news, the users’ opinions, and the users’ credibility. To solve the inference problem, we propose an efficient collapsed Gibbs sampling approach to infer the truths of news and the users’ credibility without any labelled data. Experiment results on two datasets show that the proposed method significantly outperforms the compared unsupervised methods.

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Published

2019-07-17

How to Cite

Yang, S., Shu, K., Wang, S., Gu, R., Wu, F., & Liu, H. (2019). Unsupervised Fake News Detection on Social Media: A Generative Approach. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 33(01), 5644-5651. https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v33i01.33015644

Issue

Section

AAAI Technical Track: Machine Learning