Rumor Detection on Social Media with Event Augmentations

With the rapid growth of digital data on the Internet, rumor detection on social media has been vital. Existing deep learning-based methods have achieved promising results due to their ability to learn high-level representations of rumors. Despite the success, we argue that these approaches require large reliable labeled data to train, which is time-consuming and data-inefficient. To address this challenge, we present a new solution, Rumor Detection on social media with Event Augmentations (RDEA), which innovatively integrates three augmentation strategies by modifying both reply attributes and event structure to extract meaningful rumor propagation patterns and to learn intrinsic representations of user engagement. Moreover, we introduce contrastive self-supervised learning for the efficient implementation of event augmentations and alleviate limited data issues. Extensive experiments conducted on two public datasets demonstrate that RDEA achieves state-of-the-art performance over existing baselines. Besides, we empirically show the robustness of RDEA when labeled data are limited.