EML: Emotion-Aware Meta Learning for Cross-Event False Information Detection

Modern social media’s development has dramatically changed how people obtain information. However, the wide dissemination of various false information has severely detrimental effects. Accordingly, many deep learning-based methods have been proposed to detect false information and achieve promising results. However, these methods are unsuitable for new events due to the extremely limited labeled data and their discrepant data distribution to existing events. Domain adaptation methods have been proposed to mitigate these problems. However, their performance is suboptimal because they are not sensitive to new events due to they aim to align the domain information between existing events, and they hardly capture the fine-grained difference between real and fake claims by only using semantic information. Therefore, we propose a novel Emotion-aware Meta Learning (EML) approach for cross-event false information early detection, which deeply integrates emotions in meta learning to find event-sensitive initialization parameters that quickly adapt to new events. Emotion-aware meta learning is non-trivial and faces three challenges: 1) How to effectively model semantic and emotional features to capture fine-grained differences. 2) How to reduce the impact of noise in meta learning based on semantic and emotional features. 3) How to detect the false information in a zero-shot detection scenario, i.e., no labeled data for new events. To tackle these challenges, firstly, we construct the emotion-aware meta tasks by selecting claims with similar and opposite emotions to the target claim other than usually used random sampling. Secondly, we propose a task weighting method and event-adaptation meta tasks to further improve the model’s robustness and generalization ability for detecting new events. Finally, we propose a weak label annotation method to extend EML to zero-shot detection according to the calculated labels’ confidence. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that the EML achieves superior performances on false information detection for new events.