TieFake: Title-Text Similarity and Emotion-Aware Fake News Detection

Fake news detection aims to detect fake news widely spreading on social media platforms, which can negatively influence the public and the government. Many approaches have been developed to exploit relevant information from news images, text, or videos. However, these methods may suffer from the following limitations: (1) ignore the inherent emotional information of the news, which could be beneficial since it contains the subjective intentions of the authors; (2) pay little attention to the relation (similarity) between the title and textual information in news articles, which often use irrelevant title to attract reader' attention. To this end, we propose a novel Title-Text similarity and emotion-aware Fake news detection (TieFake) method by jointly modeling the multi-modal context information and the author sentiment in a unified framework. Specifically, we respectively employ BERT and ResNeSt to learn the representations for text and images, and utilize publisher emotion extractor to capture the author's subjective emotion in the news content. We also propose a scale-dot product attention mechanism to capture the similarity between title features and textual features. Experiments are conducted on two publicly available multi-modal datasets, and the results demonstrate that our proposed method can significantly improve the performance of fake news detection. Our code is available at https://github.com/UESTC-GQJ/TieFake.