Enhancing Fake-News Detection with Node-Level Topological Features

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Author: Xu, Kaiyuan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Xu, Kaiyuan
author_facet Xu, Kaiyuan
contents In recent years, the proliferation of misinformation and fake news has posed serious threats to individuals and society, spurring intense research into automated detection methods. Previous work showed that integrating content, user preferences, and propagation structure achieves strong performance, but leaves all graph-level representation learning entirely to the GNN, hiding any explicit topological cues. To close this gap, we introduce a lightweight enhancement: for each node, we append two classical graph-theoretic metrics, degree centrality and local clustering coefficient, to its original BERT and profile embeddings, thus explicitly flagging the roles of hub and community. In the UPFD Politifact subset, this simple modification boosts macro F1 from 0.7753 to 0.8344 over the original baseline. Our study not only demonstrates the practical value of explicit topology features in fake-news detection but also provides an interpretable, easily reproducible template for fusing graph metrics in other information-diffusion tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_09974
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Enhancing Fake-News Detection with Node-Level Topological Features
Xu, Kaiyuan
Social and Information Networks
Machine Learning
In recent years, the proliferation of misinformation and fake news has posed serious threats to individuals and society, spurring intense research into automated detection methods. Previous work showed that integrating content, user preferences, and propagation structure achieves strong performance, but leaves all graph-level representation learning entirely to the GNN, hiding any explicit topological cues. To close this gap, we introduce a lightweight enhancement: for each node, we append two classical graph-theoretic metrics, degree centrality and local clustering coefficient, to its original BERT and profile embeddings, thus explicitly flagging the roles of hub and community. In the UPFD Politifact subset, this simple modification boosts macro F1 from 0.7753 to 0.8344 over the original baseline. Our study not only demonstrates the practical value of explicit topology features in fake-news detection but also provides an interpretable, easily reproducible template for fusing graph metrics in other information-diffusion tasks.
title Enhancing Fake-News Detection with Node-Level Topological Features
topic Social and Information Networks
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09974