Detecting rumors in social media using emotion based deep learning approach

Abstract

Social media, an undeniable facet of the modern era, has become a primary pathway for disseminating information. Unverified and potentially harmful rumors can have detrimental effects on both society and individuals. Owing to the plethora of content generated, it is essential to assess its alignment with factual accuracy and determine its veracity. Previous research has explored various approaches, including feature engineering and deep learning techniques, that leverage propagation theory to identify rumors. In our study, we place significant importance on examining the emotional and sentimental aspects of tweets using deep learning approaches to improve our ability to detect rumors. Leveraging the findings from the previous analysis, we propose a Sentiment and EMotion driven TransformEr Classifier method (SEMTEC). Unlike the existing studies, our method leverages the extraction of emotion and sentiment tags alongside the assimilation of the content-based information from the textual modality, i.e., the main tweet. This meticulous semantic analysis allows us to measure the user’s emotional state, leading to an impressive accuracy rate of 92% for rumor detection on the ‘‘PHEME’’ dataset. The validation is carried out on a novel dataset named ‘‘Twitter24’’. Furthermore, SEMTEC exceeds standard methods accuracy by around 2% on ‘‘Twitter24’’ dataset. Copyright 2024 Sharma and Srivastava Distributed under Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 OPEN ACCESS