Coupled Hierarchical Transformer for Stance-Aware Rumor Verification in Social Media Conversations

Jianfei Yu, Jing Jiang, Ling Min Serena Khoo, Hai Leong Chieu, Rui Xia


Abstract
The prevalent use of social media enables rapid spread of rumors on a massive scale, which leads to the emerging need of automatic rumor verification (RV). A number of previous studies focus on leveraging stance classification to enhance RV with multi-task learning (MTL) methods. However, most of these methods failed to employ pre-trained contextualized embeddings such as BERT, and did not exploit inter-task dependencies by using predicted stance labels to improve the RV task. Therefore, in this paper, to extend BERT to obtain thread representations, we first propose a Hierarchical Transformer, which divides each long thread into shorter subthreads, and employs BERT to separately represent each subthread, followed by a global Transformer layer to encode all the subthreads. We further propose a Coupled Transformer Module to capture the inter-task interactions and a Post-Level Attention layer to use the predicted stance labels for RV, respectively. Experiments on two benchmark datasets show the superiority of our Coupled Hierarchical Transformer model over existing MTL approaches.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.108
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1392–1401
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.108
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.108
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jianfei Yu, Jing Jiang, Ling Min Serena Khoo, Hai Leong Chieu, and Rui Xia. 2020. Coupled Hierarchical Transformer for Stance-Aware Rumor Verification in Social Media Conversations. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 1392–1401, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Coupled Hierarchical Transformer for Stance-Aware Rumor Verification in Social Media Conversations (Yu et al., EMNLP 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.108.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939330