# Verifying Rumors via Stance-Aware Structural Modeling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.13559 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13559/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [SemEval-2017 Task 8: RumourEval: Determining rumour veracity and support for rumours](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05972/) (2017)
- [RumourEval 2019: Determining Rumour Veracity and Support for Rumours](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.06683/) (2018)
- [All-in-one: Multi-task Learning for Rumour Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03713/) (2018)
- [Towards Propagation Uncertainty: Edge-enhanced Bayesian Graph Convolutional Networks for Rumor Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11934/) (2021)
- [Jointly embedding the local and global relations of heterogeneous graph for rumor detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04465/) (2019)
- [Learning Reporting Dynamics during Breaking News for Rumour Detection in Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.07363/) (2016)
- [Detecting False Rumors from Retweet Dynamics on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.13103/) (2022)
- [Sequence Graph Network for Online Debate Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18696/) (2024)
- [Sarcasm Detection as a Catalyst: Improving Stance Detection with Cross-Target Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03787/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Verifying rumors on social media is critical for mitigating the spread of false information. The stances of conversation replies often provide important cues to determine a rumor's veracity. However, existing models struggle to jointly capture semantic content, stance information, and conversation strructure, especially under the sequence length constraints of transformer-based encoders. In this work, we propose a stance-aware structural modeling that encodes each post in a discourse with its stance signal and aggregates reply embedddings by stance category enabling a scalable and semantically enriched representation of the entire thread. To enhance structural awareness, we introduce stance distribution and hierarchical depth as covariates, capturing stance imbalance and the influence of reply depth. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms prior methods in the ability to predict truthfulness of a rumor. We also demonstrate that our model is versatile for early detection and cross-platfrom generalization.