Call Attention to Rumors: Deep Attention Based Recurrent Neural Networks for Early Rumor Detection

The proliferation of social media in communication and information dissemination has made it an ideal platform for spreading rumors. Automatically debunking rumors at their stage of diffusion is known as \textit{early rumor detection}, which refers to dealing with sequential posts regarding disputed factual claims with certain variations and highly textual duplication over time. Thus, identifying trending rumors demands an efficient yet flexible model that is able to capture long-range dependencies among postings and produce distinct representations for the accurate early detection. However, it is a challenging task to apply conventional classification algorithms to rumor detection in earliness since they rely on hand-crafted features which require intensive manual efforts in the case of large amount of posts. This paper presents a deep attention model on the basis of recurrent neural networks (RNN) to learn \textit{selectively} temporal hidden representations of sequential posts for identifying rumors. The proposed model delves soft-attention into the recurrence to simultaneously pool out distinct features with particular focus and produce hidden representations that capture contextual variations of relevant posts over time. Extensive experiments on real datasets collected from social media websites demonstrate that (1) the deep attention based RNN model outperforms state-of-the-arts that rely on hand-crafted features; (2) the introduction of soft attention mechanism can effectively distill relevant parts to rumors from original posts in advance; (3) the proposed method detects rumors more quickly and accurately than competitors.