Beyond Detection: A Defend-and-Summarize Strategy for Robust and Interpretable Rumor Analysis on Social Media

As the impact of social media gradually escalates, people are more likely to be exposed to indistinguishable fake news. Therefore, numerous studies have attempted to detect rumors on social media by analyzing the textual content and propagation paths. However, fewer works on rumor detection tasks consider the malicious attacks commonly observed at response level. Moreover, existing detection models have poor interpretability. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework named Defend-And-Summarize (DAS) based on the concept that responses sharing similar opinions should exhibit similar features. Specifically, DAS filters out the attack responses and summarizes the responsive posts of each conversation thread in both extractive and abstractive ways to provide multi-perspective prediction explanations. Furthermore, we enhance our detection architecture with the transformer and Bi-directional Graph Convolutional Networks. Experiments on three public datasets, i.e., RumorEval2019, Twitter15, and Twitter16, demonstrate that our DAS defends against malicious attacks and provides prediction explanations, and the proposed detection model achieves state-of-the-art.