PHEMEPlus: Enriching Social Media Rumour Verification with External Evidence

Work on social media rumour verification utilises signals from posts, their propagation and users involved. Other lines of work target identifying and fact-checking claims based on information from Wikipedia, or trustworthy news articles without considering social media context. However works combining the information from social media with external evidence from the wider web are lacking. To facilitate research in this direction, we release a novel dataset, PHEMEPlus(1), an extension of the PHEME benchmark, which contains social media conversations as well as relevant external evidence for each rumour. We demonstrate the effectiveness of incorporating such evidence in improving rumour verification models. Additionally, as part of the evidence collection, we evaluate various ways of query formulation to identify the most effective method.

Automated summary

Work on social media rumour verification utilizes signals from posts, propagation, and users, and incorporating external evidence improves the effectiveness of rumour verification models. To support research in this area, a new dataset called PHEMEPlus is released, which includes social media conversations and relevant external evidence for each rumour.