Section: New Results

Semi-supervised Learning for Misinformation Detection

Participants: Fragkiskos Malliaros (Collaboration: Adrien Benamira, Benjamin Devillers, Etienne Lesot, Ayush K. Ray, Manal Saadi, CentraleSupélec)

Social networks have become the main platforms for information dissemination. Nevertheless, due to the increasing number of users, social media platforms tend to be highly vulnerable to the propagation of disinformation – making the detection of fake news a challenging task. In our work, we have focused on content-based methods for detecting fake news – casting the problem to a binary text classification one (an article corresponds to either fake news or not). The main challenge here stems from the fact that the number of labeled data is limited; very few articles can be examined and annotated as fake. To this extend, we opted for semi-supervised learning approaches. In particular, we have proposed a graph-based semi-supervised fake news detection method, based on graph neural networks [34]. Our intuition is that, graphs are expressive models that are able to capture contextual dependencies among articles, alleviating the label scarcity constraint. On a high level, our framework is composed of three components: $i$) embedding of articles in the Euclidean space; $ii$) construction of an article similarity graph; $iii$) inference of missing labels using graph learning techniques. The experimental results indicate that the proposed methodology achieves better performance compared to traditional classification techniques, especially when trained on limited number of labeled articles.