Verifying Rumors via Stance-Aware Structural Modeling

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Nkhata, Gibson, Oyshi, Uttamasha Anjally, Mai, Quan, Gauch, Susan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Nkhata, Gibson
Oyshi, Uttamasha Anjally
Mai, Quan
Gauch, Susan
author_facet Nkhata, Gibson
Oyshi, Uttamasha Anjally
Mai, Quan
Gauch, Susan
contents Verifying rumors on social media is critical for mitigating the spread of false information. The stances of conversation replies often provide important cues to determine a rumor's veracity. However, existing models struggle to jointly capture semantic content, stance information, and conversation strructure, especially under the sequence length constraints of transformer-based encoders. In this work, we propose a stance-aware structural modeling that encodes each post in a discourse with its stance signal and aggregates reply embedddings by stance category enabling a scalable and semantically enriched representation of the entire thread. To enhance structural awareness, we introduce stance distribution and hierarchical depth as covariates, capturing stance imbalance and the influence of reply depth. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms prior methods in the ability to predict truthfulness of a rumor. We also demonstrate that our model is versatile for early detection and cross-platfrom generalization.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_13559
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Verifying Rumors via Stance-Aware Structural Modeling
Nkhata, Gibson
Oyshi, Uttamasha Anjally
Mai, Quan
Gauch, Susan
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
Verifying rumors on social media is critical for mitigating the spread of false information. The stances of conversation replies often provide important cues to determine a rumor's veracity. However, existing models struggle to jointly capture semantic content, stance information, and conversation strructure, especially under the sequence length constraints of transformer-based encoders. In this work, we propose a stance-aware structural modeling that encodes each post in a discourse with its stance signal and aggregates reply embedddings by stance category enabling a scalable and semantically enriched representation of the entire thread. To enhance structural awareness, we introduce stance distribution and hierarchical depth as covariates, capturing stance imbalance and the influence of reply depth. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms prior methods in the ability to predict truthfulness of a rumor. We also demonstrate that our model is versatile for early detection and cross-platfrom generalization.
title Verifying Rumors via Stance-Aware Structural Modeling
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.13559