Generating Zero-shot Abstractive Explanations for Rumour Verification

The task of rumour verification in social media concerns assessing the veracity of a claim on the basis of conversation threads that result from it. While previous work has focused on predicting a veracity label, here we reformulate the task to generate model-centric free-text explanations of a rumour's veracity. The approach is model agnostic in that it generalises to any model. Here we propose a novel GNN-based rumour verification model. We follow a zero-shot approach by first applying post-hoc explainability methods to score the most important posts within a thread and then we use these posts to generate informative explanations using opinion-guided summarisation. To evaluate the informativeness of the explanatory summaries, we exploit the few-shot learning capabilities of a large language model (LLM). Our experiments show that LLMs can have similar agreement to humans in evaluating summaries. Importantly, we show explanatory abstractive summaries are more informative and better reflect the predicted rumour veracity than just using the highest ranking posts in the thread.