Active Learning for Rumor Identification on Social Media

Parsa Farinneya, Mohammad Mahdi Abdollah Pour, Sardar Hamidian, Mona Diab


Abstract
Social media has emerged as a key channel for seeking information. Online users spend several hours reading, posting, and searching for news on microblogging platforms daily. However, this could act as a double-edged sword especially when not all information online is reliable. Moreover, the inherently unmoderated nature of social media renders identifying unverified information ever more challenging. Most of the existing approaches for rumor tracking are not scalable because of their dependency on a significant amount of labeled data. In this work, we investigate this problem from different angles. We design an Active-Transfer Learning (ATL) strategy to identify rumors with a limited amount of annotated data. We go beyond that and investigate the impact of leveraging various machine learning approaches in addition to different contextual representations. We discuss the impact of multiple classifiers on a limited amount of annotated data followed by an interactive approach to gradually update the models by adding the least certain samples (LCS) from the pool of unlabeled data. Our proposed Active Learning (AL) strategy achieves faster convergence in terms of the F-score while requiring fewer annotated samples (42% of the whole dataset for the best model).
Anthology ID:
2021.findings-emnlp.387
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4556–4565
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.387
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.findings-emnlp.387
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Parsa Farinneya, Mohammad Mahdi Abdollah Pour, Sardar Hamidian, and Mona Diab. 2021. Active Learning for Rumor Identification on Social Media. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021, pages 4556–4565, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Active Learning for Rumor Identification on Social Media (Farinneya et al., Findings 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.387.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.387.mp4