Rumour identification on Twitter as a function of novel textual and language-context features

Social microblogs are one of the popular platforms for information spreading. However, with several advantages, these platforms are being used for spreading rumours. At present, the majority of existing approaches identify rumours at the topic level instead of at the tweet/post level. Moreover, prior studies used the sentiment and linguistic features for rumours identification without considering discrete positive and negative emotions and effective part-of-speech features in content-based approaches. Similarly, the majority of prior studies used content-based approaches for feature generation, and recent context-based approaches were not explored. To cope with these challenges, a robust framework for rumour detection at the tweet level is designed in this paper. The model used word2vec embeddings and bidirectional encoder representations from transformers method (BERT) from context-based and discrete emotions, linguistic, and metadata characteristics from content-based approaches. According to our knowledge, we are the first ones who used these features for rumour identification at the tweet/post level. The framework is tested on four real-life twitter microblog datasets. The results show that the detection model is capable of detecting 97%, 86%, 85%, and 80% of rumours on four datasets respectively. In addition, the proposed framework outperformed the three latest state-of-the-art baselines. BERT model presented the best performance among context-based approaches, and linguistic features are best performing among content-based approaches as a stand-alone model. Moreover, the utilization of two-step feature selection further improves the detection model performance.