Towards Real-World Rumor Detection: Anomaly Detection Framework with Graph Supervised Contrastive Learning

Chaoqun Cui, Caiyan Jia


Abstract
Current rumor detection methods based on propagation structure learning predominately treat rumor detection as a class-balanced classification task on limited labeled data. However, real-world social media data exhibits an imbalanced distribution with a minority of rumors among massive regular posts. To address the data scarcity and imbalance issues, we construct two large-scale conversation datasets from Weibo and Twitter and analyze the domain distributions. We find obvious differences between rumor and non-rumor distributions, with non-rumors mostly in entertainment domains while rumors concentrate in news, indicating the conformity of rumor detection to an anomaly detection paradigm. Correspondingly, we propose the Anomaly Detection framework with Graph Supervised Contrastive Learning (AD-GSCL). It heuristically treats unlabeled data as non-rumors and adapts graph contrastive learning for rumor detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate AD-GSCL’s superiority under class-balanced, imbalanced, and few-shot conditions. Our findings provide valuable insights for real-world rumor detection featuring imbalanced data distributions.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.476
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:
7141–7155
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.476/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chaoqun Cui and Caiyan Jia. 2025. Towards Real-World Rumor Detection: Anomaly Detection Framework with Graph Supervised Contrastive Learning. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 7141–7155, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Real-World Rumor Detection: Anomaly Detection Framework with Graph Supervised Contrastive Learning (Cui & Jia, COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.476.pdf