Multi-stage Transfer Learning for Fake News Detection Using AWD-LSTM Network

In the recent decades, the automatic veracity verification of rumors is essential, since online social media platforms allow users to post news item or express opinion towards a circulating piece of information without much restriction. The intention of fake news is to make the readers believe in inaccurate information, where the detection of fake news by using content is a difficult task. So, the auxiliary information: user profile, social engagement of the users, and other user’s comments are useful in the detection of fake news. In this manuscript, a novel multi-stage transfer learning approach is introduced for an effective fake news detection, where it utilizes user’s comments as auxiliary information to detect whether the given tweet is true or false. The stances of the response tweets contain opinions on news/rumors are often used for verifying the veracity of the circulating information. In order to devastate the effects of the specific rumors at the earliest, the multi-stage transfer learning approach automatically predict veracity of rumors jointly with the stances of their response tweets. The proposed multi-stage transfer learning is an inductive transfer learning variation that is used to forecast the stance of responses, then to identify fake news. The proposed model’s effectiveness is evaluated on the two-benchmark datasets: semEval-2017 task 8 and PHEME. The proposed model outperformed the existing approaches by obtaining a classification accuracy of 64.30% and 65.30%, an F-measure of 65.95% and 63.90% on semEval-2017 task 8, and PHEME on event-wise datasets.