BIC: Twitter Bot Detection with Text-Graph Interaction and Semantic Consistency

Zhenyu Lei, Herun Wan, Wenqian Zhang, Shangbin Feng, Zilong Chen, Jundong Li, Qinghua Zheng, Minnan Luo


Abstract
Twitter bots are automatic programs operated by malicious actors to manipulate public opinion and spread misinformation. Research efforts have been made to automatically identify bots based on texts and networks on social media. Existing methods only leverage texts or networks alone, and while few works explored the shallow combination of the two modalities, we hypothesize that the interaction and information exchange between texts and graphs could be crucial for holistically evaluating bot activities on social media. In addition, according to a recent survey (Cresci, 2020), Twitter bots are constantly evolving while advanced bots steal genuine users’ tweets and dilute their malicious content to evade detection. This results in greater inconsistency across the timeline of novel Twitter bots, which warrants more attention. In light of these challenges, we propose BIC, a Twitter Bot detection framework with text-graph Interaction and semantic Consistency. Specifically, in addition to separately modeling the two modalities on social media, BIC employs a text-graph interaction module to enable information exchange across modalities in the learning process. In addition, given the stealing behavior of novel Twitter bots, BIC proposes to model semantic consistency in tweets based on attention weights while using it to augment the decision process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BIC consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on two widely adopted datasets. Further analyses reveal that text-graph interactions and modeling semantic consistency are essential improvements and help combat bot evolution.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.575
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10326–10340
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.575
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.575
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhenyu Lei, Herun Wan, Wenqian Zhang, Shangbin Feng, Zilong Chen, Jundong Li, Qinghua Zheng, and Minnan Luo. 2023. BIC: Twitter Bot Detection with Text-Graph Interaction and Semantic Consistency. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 10326–10340, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
BIC: Twitter Bot Detection with Text-Graph Interaction and Semantic Consistency (Lei et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.575.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.575.mp4