Toward Effective Multi-Domain Rumor Detection in Social Networks Using Domain-Gated Mixture-of-Experts

Abstract

Social media platforms have become key channels for spreading and tracking rumors due to their widespread accessibility and ease of information sharing. Rumors can continuously emerge across diverse domains and topics, often with the intent to mislead society for personal or commercial gain. Therefore, developing methods that can accurately detect rumors at early stages is crucial to mitigating their negative impact. While existing approaches often specialize in single-domain detection, their performance degrades when applied to new domains due to shifts in data distribution, such as lexical patterns and propagation dynamics. To bridge this gap, this study introduces PerFact, a large-scale multi-domain rumor dataset comprising 8,034 annotated posts from the X platform, annotated into two primary categories: rumor (including true, false, and unverified rumors) and non-rumor. Annotator agreement, measured via Fleiss' Kappa ($\kappa = 0.74$), ensures high-quality labels. This research further proposes an effective multi-domain rumor detection model that employs a domain gate to dynamically aggregate multiple feature representations extracted through a Mixture-of-Experts method. Each expert combines CNN and BiLSTM networks to capture local syntactic features and long-range contextual dependencies. By leveraging both textual content and publisher information, the proposed model classifies posts into rumor and non-rumor categories with high accuracy. Evaluations demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, achieving an F1-score of 79.86\% and an accuracy of 79.98\% in multi-domain settings. Keywords: Rumor Detection, Multi-Domain, Natural Language Processing, Social Networks, Mixture-of-Experts Model