Challenges in Pre-Training Graph Neural Networks for Context-Based Fake News Detection: An Evaluation of Current Strategies and Resource Limitations

Gregor Donabauer, Udo Kruschwitz


Abstract
Pre-training of neural networks has recently revolutionized the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and has before demonstrated its effectiveness in computer vision. At the same time, advances around the detection of fake news were mainly driven by the context-based paradigm, where different types of signals (e.g. from social media) form graph-like structures that hold contextual information apart from the news article to classify. We propose to merge these two developments by applying pre-training of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in the domain of context-based fake news detection. Our experiments provide an evaluation of different pre-training strategies for graph-based misinformation detection and demonstrate that transfer learning does currently not lead to significant improvements over training a model from scratch in the domain. We argue that a major current issue is the lack of suitable large-scale resources that can be used for pre-training.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.267
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
2997–3004
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.267
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Gregor Donabauer and Udo Kruschwitz. 2024. Challenges in Pre-Training Graph Neural Networks for Context-Based Fake News Detection: An Evaluation of Current Strategies and Resource Limitations. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 2997–3004, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Challenges in Pre-Training Graph Neural Networks for Context-Based Fake News Detection: An Evaluation of Current Strategies and Resource Limitations (Donabauer & Kruschwitz, LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.267.pdf