Rumor Detection on Social Media with Temporal Propagation Structure Optimization

Xingyu Peng, Junran Wu, Ruomei Liu, Ke Xu


Abstract
Traditional methods for detecting rumors on social media primarily focus on analyzing textual content, often struggling to capture the complexity of online interactions. Recent research has shifted towards leveraging graph neural networks to model the hierarchical conversation structure that emerges during rumor propagation. However, these methods tend to overlook the temporal aspect of rumor propagation and may disregard potential noise within the propagation structure. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that incorporates temporal information by constructing a weighted propagation tree, where the weight of each edge represents the time interval between connected posts. Drawing upon the theory of structural entropy, we transform this tree into a coding tree. This transformation aims to preserve the essential structure of rumor propagation while reducing noise. Finally, we introduce a recursive neural network to learn from the coding tree for rumor veracity prediction. Experimental results on two common datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.261
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3865–3878
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.261/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xingyu Peng, Junran Wu, Ruomei Liu, and Ke Xu. 2025. Rumor Detection on Social Media with Temporal Propagation Structure Optimization. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 3865–3878, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Rumor Detection on Social Media with Temporal Propagation Structure Optimization (Peng et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.261.pdf