arXiv subjects

Kai Shu

Publications and source records attributed to Kai Shu.

113 records · Page 7Linked to original sources

arXiv2018

Beyond News Contents: The Role of Social Context for Fake News Detection

Social media is becoming popular for news consumption due to its fast dissemination, easy access, and low cost. However, it also enables the wide propagation of fake news, i.e., news with intentionally false information. Detecting fake news is an important task, which not only ensures users to receive authentic information but also help maintain a trustworthy news ecosystem. The majority of existing detection algorithms focus on finding clues from news contents, which are generally not effective because fake news is often intentionally written to mislead users by mimicking true news. Therefore, we need to explore auxiliary information to improve detection. The social context during news dissemination process on social media forms the inherent tri-relationship, the relationship among publishers, news pieces, and users, which has potential to improve fake news detection. For example, partisan-biased publishers are more likely to publish fake news, and low-credible users are more likely to share fake news. In this paper, we study the novel problem of exploiting social context for fake news detection. We propose a tri-relationship embedding framework TriFN, which models publisher-news relations and user-news interactions simultaneously for fake news classification. We conduct experiments on two real-world datasets, which demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly outperforms other baseline methods for fake news detection.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2018

Securing Social Media User Data - An Adversarial Approach

Social media users generate tremendous amounts of data. To better serve users, it is required to share the user-related data among researchers, advertisers and application developers. Publishing such data would raise more concerns on user privacy. To encourage data sharing and mitigate user privacy concerns, a number of anonymization and de-anonymization algorithms have been developed to help protect privacy of social media users. In this work, we propose a new adversarial attack specialized for social media data. We further provide a principled way to assess effectiveness of anonymizing different aspects of social media data. Our work sheds light on new privacy risks in social media data due to innate heterogeneity of user-generated data which require striking balance between sharing user data and protecting user privacy.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2018

Studying Fake News via Network Analysis: Detection and Mitigation

Social media for news consumption is becoming increasingly popular due to its easy access, fast dissemination, and low cost. However, social media also enable the wide propagation of "fake news", i.e., news with intentionally false information. Fake news on social media poses significant negative societal effects, and also presents unique challenges. To tackle the challenges, many existing works exploit various features, from a network perspective, to detect and mitigate fake news. In essence, news dissemination ecosystem involves three dimensions on social media, i.e., a content dimension, a social dimension, and a temporal dimension. In this chapter, we will review network properties for studying fake news, introduce popular network types and how these networks can be used to detect and mitigation fake news on social media.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2017

Cross-Platform Emoji Interpretation: Analysis, a Solution, and Applications

Most social media platforms are largely based on text, and users often write posts to describe where they are, what they are seeing, and how they are feeling. Because written text lacks the emotional cues of spoken and face-to-face dialogue, ambiguities are common in written language. This problem is exacerbated in the short, informal nature of many social media posts. To bypass this issue, a suite of special characters called "emojis," which are small pictograms, are embedded within the text. Many emojis are small depictions of facial expressions designed to help disambiguate the emotional meaning of the text. However, a new ambiguity arises in the way that emojis are rendered. Every platform (Windows, Mac, and Android, to name a few) renders emojis according to their own style. In fact, it has been shown that some emojis can be rendered so differently that they look "happy" on some platforms, and "sad" on others. In this work, we use real-world data to verify the existence of this problem. We verify that the usage of the same emoji can be significantly different across platforms, with some emojis exhibiting different sentiment polarities on different platforms. We propose a solution to identify the intended emoji based on the platform-specific nature of the emoji used by the author of a social media post. We apply our solution to sentiment analysis, a task that can benefit from the emoji calibration technique we use in this work. We conduct experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of the mapping in this task.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2017

Fake News Detection on Social Media: A Data Mining Perspective

Social media for news consumption is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, its low cost, easy access, and rapid dissemination of information lead people to seek out and consume news from social media. On the other hand, it enables the wide spread of "fake news", i.e., low quality news with intentionally false information. The extensive spread of fake news has the potential for extremely negative impacts on individuals and society. Therefore, fake news detection on social media has recently become an emerging research that is attracting tremendous attention. Fake news detection on social media presents unique characteristics and challenges that make existing detection algorithms from traditional news media ineffective or not applicable. First, fake news is intentionally written to mislead readers to believe false information, which makes it difficult and nontrivial to detect based on news content; therefore, we need to include auxiliary information, such as user social engagements on social media, to help make a determination. Second, exploiting this auxiliary information is challenging in and of itself as users' social engagements with fake news produce data that is big, incomplete, unstructured, and noisy. Because the issue of fake news detection on social media is both challenging and relevant, we conducted this survey to further facilitate research on the problem. In this survey, we present a comprehensive review of detecting fake news on social media, including fake news characterizations on psychology and social theories, existing algorithms from a data mining perspective, evaluation metrics and representative datasets. We also discuss related research areas, open problems, and future research directions for fake news detection on social media.

cs.SI↗