Rumor gatekeepers: Unsupervised ranking of Arabic twitter authorities for information verification

The advent of online social networks (OSNs) has catalyzed the formation of novel learning communities. Identifying experts within OSNs has become a critical component for facilitating knowledge exchange and enhancing self-awareness, particularly in contexts such as rumor verification processes. Research efforts aimed at locating authorities in OSNs are scant, largely due to the scarcity of annotated datasets. This work represents a contribution to the domain of unsupervised learning to address the challenge of authorities’ identification in Twitter. We have employed advanced natural language processing technique to transfer knowledge concerning topics in the Arabic language and to discern the semantic connections among candidates within Twitter in zero-shot learning. We take advantage of the Single-labeled Arabic News Articles Dataset (SANAD) to perform the process of extracting domain features and applying these features in finding authorities using the Authority Finding in Arabic Twitter (AuFIN) dataset. Our evaluation assessed the extent of extracted topical features transferred and the efficacy of authorities’ retrieval in comparison to the latest unsupervised models in this domain. Our approach successfully extracted and integrated the limited available topical semantic features of the language into the representation of candidates. The findings indicate that our hybrid model surpasses those that rely solely on lexical features of language and network topology, as well as other contemporary approaches to topic-specific expert finding.