Empower rumor events detection from Chinese microblogs with multi-type individual information

Online social media has become an ideal place in spreading rumor events with its convenience in communication and information dissemination, which raises the difficulty in debunking rumor events automatically. To deal with such a challenge, traditional classification approaches relying on manually labeled features have to face a daunting number of human efforts. With the consideration of the realness of a rumor event, it will be verified and authenticated with multi-type individual information, especially with individuals’ emotional expressions to events and their own credibility. This paper presents a novel two-layer GRU model for rumor events detection based on multi-type individual information (MII) and a dynamic time-series (DTS) algorithm, named as MII–DTS-GRU. Specifically, MII refers to adopt the sentiment dictionary to identify fine-grained human emotional expressions to events and fuse with the individual credibility. Besides, the DTS algorithm retains the time distribution of social events. Experimental results on Sina Weibo datasets show that our model achieves a high accuracy of 96.3% and demonstrate that our proposed MII–DTS-GRU model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on rumor events detection.