2022 IEEE 2nd International Conference on Power, Electronics and Computer Applications (ICPECA)
A Multilevel Graph Convolution Neural Network
Model for Rumor Detection
2022 IEEE 2nd International Conference on Power, Electronics and Computer Applications (ICPECA) | 978-1-6654-4276-3/22/$31.00 ©2022 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/ICPECA53709.2022.9719043
Yuanyuan Ma
College of Computer and Information College of Computer and Information
Technology,
China Three Gorges University, China Three Gorges University,
Yichang, China
mayuanyuan@ctgu.edu.cn
Abstract—Rumor detection is a challenging task on social
medias. When a post is propagated on social media, it usually
contains four types of information: 1) content; 2) time of
publishing; 3) structure of propagation; 4) social interaction.
In most previous studies, the information has not been
effectively combined to detect rumors. A multilevel graph
convolution model including post level and event level is
proposed to detect rumors in this paper. For post level graph
convolution network based on propagation relationship, it uses
a graph convolution network with rumor propagation graph to
learn post level features. For event level graph convolution
based on event interaction relationship, a graph convolution
network with event relationship graph is applied to bridge post
level features and event interaction information to obtain the
feature representation of events. The experiment results shows
that rumor detection accuracy of our model is 94.3%, which is
superior to other newly models.
Keywords—Rumor Detection, Graph Convolution Neural
Network, Propagation Structure, Social Networks
I. INTRODUCTION
Recently, with popularization of social media such as
Microblog and twitter, people can freely release information
and directly establish contact and communication, which not
only accelerates the flow and dissemination of public
information, but also makes generate and disseminate rumor
events more easily and fastly. And most of the information in
social media is released by individuals which are lack of
supervision. Some people even deliberately issue false
information for attention or other special purposes. What's
more, Rumor events are often inflammatory, since that rumor
publishers may consciously use some inflammatory
statements in order to make their rumors spread in a wider
range. Users who comment on and forward rumor are usually
more vulnerable to the temptation of stimulating statements,
and may participate in the spread of more rumor events.
Most of previous methods regard the rumor event as an
independent individual, only consider the characteristics of
the event itself (such as propagation structure, post sequence
feature and user feature), and ignore the interaction between
events on the social platform. In fact, events are not
independent on social platforms. Every event in the social
platform and the users associated with the event are related,
including posting, forwarding comments, etc. And the
interaction between these users is also a reflection of the
relationship between events related to these users.
In order to consider propagation feature of event and the
interaction information on social platforms adequately, a
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Shouzhi Xu Fangmin Dong
College of Computer and Information
Technology, Technology,
China Three Gorges University,
Yichang, China Yichang, China
xsz@ctgu.edu.cn fmdong@ctgu.edu.cn
multilevel graph convolution network model (MGCN)
including post level and event level for rumor detection is
proposed in this paper. In this model, the post level social
network graph is the propagation graph, and it takes the time
difference after publishing as the edge weight. Event level
social network graph takes events as nodes and the
correlation degree between events as edge weight. The GCN
network is applied to aggregate the post text features and
propagation clues. Next the aggregation representation is
spliced with the source post text features to obtain the post
level fusion features. Then the GCN network is used to
bridge the post level fusion features and event interaction
clues as the final fusion multi-level features of the event
node. The main points of this paper are as follows:
1) GCN is introduced for rumor detection. The MGCN
model considers both post level social networks and event
level social networks. The deep integration of two levels of
social networks is used to detect rumors.
2) The source post text feature and the post level feature
are combined to improve rumor detection.
II. RELATED WORK
A. The Conventional Methods
Most of early researches on rumor detection focused on
artificial design features. Castillo[1] designed a variety of
features from a statistical point of view, such as text length,
number of emotional words, number of user registration days
and number of friends, and used the decision-tree
classification algorithm to evaluate the authenticity of
information related to specific topics on the twitter platform.
Wu[2] considered that the traditional rumor detection
method ignored the post propagation structure. They
proposed a hybrid SVM based on a graph kernel to capture
the semantic features and high-order propagation patterns to
improve detection accuracy. Ma[3] proposed a kernel-based
approach to capture high-level representations that
distinguish different types of rumors by assessing the
similarity between propagation trees. These conventional
methods rely heavily on handcrafted feature engineering to
extract informative feature , which is inefficient and usually
require high processing cost.
B. Deep Learning Methods
The neural network can efficiently explore the features of
events on social medias, so the direction of rumor detection
has gradually shifted from feature mining to model structure
design. Ma[4] discovered the continuity of the text stream,
1225 21–23 January 2022, Shenyang, China
 and that RNN could capture the dynamic time signals of
rumor forwarding. So a RNN based rumor detection model
uses timing relationship of relevant posts to learn the
semantic features of tweet context over time. In addition, She
built top-down and bottom-up tree-structured RvNN to get
the hidden feature vectors from both text contents and
propagation sequences[5]. Liu[6] proposed a CNN+RNN
model based on time series classifier to capture the global
and local changes of user characteristics along the
propagation path to detect false news. Its input is time-series
in news forwarding paths. Alkhodairet[7] trained a LSTM
model which only learns the source post’s content to classify
rumors. Chen[8] provide an RNN-based deep attention
model, which determined different features by learning latent
representation from sequential tweets. However, the above
methods only care the order of post publishing, so they can’t
learn the structural characteristics of rumor propagation. It
needs introduce GCN to model the propagation relationship.
C. The GCN Method
Graph neural network is an effective framework for
learning graph structure representation, which is mainly used
for graph node classification and graph structure
classification. Yu[9] proposed a GCN model integrating
static features such as user basic information and text content
to capture the propagation characteristics of rumors and
detect rumors. Xu[10] proposed a Dual-grained Feature
Aggregation graph neural networks model. It applied a GCN
model with a graph of rumor propagation to learn the text-
granularity representations with the spreading of events and
employed a GNN with a document graph to update
aggregated features of both word and text granularity. Wu[11]
proposed a gated graph neural network based algorithm
called PGNN, which can generate powerful representations
for each node in the propagation graph. This model
dynamically adjusted the weight of each node in the
propagation graph by introducing an attention mechanism.
Graph neural network methods make full use of the event
propagation structure, but these methods treat event as an
isolated individual, ignoring the interaction information
between events on social networks.
In our opinion, the propagation structure of event and the
interactive information between events are both important
parts. Inspired by the GCN, MGCN model is proposed to
capture and bridge both post-level and event-level features of
rumor detection events.
III. STATEMENT OF RUMOR STRUCTURES
A. Basic Symbols
For a rumor detection dataset of events, each event ci
consists of a series of related posts, and each event
corresponds to a propagation graph g i . All events form an
event diagram G, which can be given by,
 C  {c1 , c2 ,..., cn , G} 
 ci  {c0i , c1i , c2i ,..., cmi i , gi } 
where n is the number of events, mi is the number of
response posts for the event ci , c0i is the source post, its
i i
text feature vector is x . c refers to the j-th response post
0 j
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j  [1, mi ] , its text feature vector is x ij . In addition, each
event ci is related to a label yi  {F , T } (i.e., False
Rumor or True Rumor).
gi  (Vi , Ei ) : Node set
1) For post level graph
Vi  {c , c , c ,..., c } represents all posts (source post and
i
0
i
1
i
2
i
mi
response posts) nodes of the event ci , and edge set
Ei  {esti | s, t  0,1,..., mi } represents the set of edges from
response post to the forwarded post. For example, if cti is a
response to csi , there will be an edge between cti and csi ,
i.e., esti . Denote Ai  R( mi 1)( mi 1) as the adjacency matrix
of g i where
 1 i
1  (ln time ) /10 , if est exists
 as ,t  Ai , as ,t   s ,t 
0 , otherwise

among them, esti  Ei , times ,t represents the time
difference between the publishing time of forwarded post
csi and response post cti , as ,t represents the weight of
edges between nodes and it also represents the strength of
relationship between nodes, which is equivalent to the
impact of response posts on the forwarded post.
2) For event level graph G  ( Node, Edge) : It is
structured according to the co-participating users among the
events, where node set Node  {c1 , c2 ,..., cn } , and edge set
Edge  {edge pq | p, q  1, 2,..., n} represents the connection
between events. For example, if there are any co-
participating users between event c p and event cq , there
will be an edge between them, i.e., edge pq . Denote
A  R n n as the adjacency matrix of G , where

un p , q , if edgepq exists
 ap , q  A, ap , q   

0 , otherwise
among them, edgepq  Edge , un p , q represents the
correlation degree between events, which is the number of
users who participate in both event c p and event c p at
the same time, a p , q represents the weight of the edges
between nodes, which represents the strength of the
relationship between event nodes.
3) For the GCN Method: GCN[12] is a multi-layer
neural network, which processes graph data and generates
embedded vectors of nodes in a rumor event according to
their neighborhoods. GCN can encode local graph structure
and node features. Its forward propagation formula is given
by,
 ˆ (l )W (l ) ) 
H (l 1)  F ( A, H (l ) ;W (l ) )  ( AH
where   D1/ 2 AD1/ 2 is the normalized symmetric
adjacency matrix, D is the degree matrix and W (l )
 represents the trainable weight matrix for the (l+1)-th
hidden layer. ( ) denotes an activation function.
Then the three-layer GCN model function is as follows,
 H (3)  ( Aˆ ( Aˆ ( AH
ˆ (0)W (0) )W (1) )W (2) ) 
Here, W (0) is an input-to-hidden weight matrix for the
first hidden layer. W (1) is a hidden weight matrix, while
W (2) is a hidden-to-output weight matrix.
B. Model Framework
A multilevel graph convolution network model for rumor
detection (MGCN, in brief) is proposed. The core idea of this
model is to use graph convolution network to obtain and fuse
the information of two different levels of social graph to
Fig. 1. MGCN Model
C. Post Level GCN Module
The propagation of information between the source post
and the reply post cannot be looked down upon. We use the
propagation structure and text feature to generate event
individual feature to improve the performance of rumor
detection. After constructing the post level social graph, as
well as the event propagation graph gi  (Vi , Ei ) , by
substituting Ai  R( mi 1)( mi 1) and X i  [ x0 , x1 , x2 ,..., xmi ]
i i i i T
to Eq. (6) over three layers, we write the equations for Post
Level GCN (PLGCN) as below:
 Hi(3)  ( Aˆi ( Aˆi ( Aˆi X iW (0) )W (1) )W (2) ) 
 hgi  MeanPooling( H i(3) )  MaxPooling( H i(3) ) 
( mi 1)v3
where H i
(3)
R represents the output-layer
feature matrix in the three-layer PLGCN. Wi (0)  R d v1 ,
Wi (1)  Rv1 v2 , Wi (2)  Rv2 v3 are the trainable weight matrix
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obtain the final representation of events for rumor detection.
The MGCN model consists of three modules: post level
GCN module, event level GCN module and rumor detection
module, as shown in Fig. 1.
1) The post level GCN module constructs the post level
social network graph, and applies GCN network to aggregate
the post text features and propagation clues. Then it splices
the aggregation representation with the source post text
features to obtain the post level fusion features.
2) The event level GCN module builds the event
interaction graph, and uses the GCN network to bridge the
post level fusion features and event interaction clues as the
final fusion multi-level features of the event node.
3) The rumor detection module trains the classification
function to predict the label of events.
of PLGCN. We employ mean-pooling operators and max-
pooling operators to aggregate information from these node
representations as Eq. (8). The propagation features
{hgi | i  1, 2,..., n} of all events constitute the propagation
feature matrix H g  [hg1 , hg2 , hg3 ,..., hgn ] .
T
Then, the source-post text feature matrix
X   [ x10 , x02 , x03 ,..., x0n ]T is concatenated with the
propagation feature matrix H g  [hg1 , hg2 , hg3 ,..., hgn ]
T
to
construct a fused feature matrix F  [ f1 , f 2 , f3 ,..., f n ]T
, as
Eq. (9):
 F  cat( X , H g ) 
D. Event Level GCN Module
If only considering the social network at the post level
and ignoring the social network at the event level, it may
affect the detection results. Therefore, the Event Level GCN
module (ELGCN, in brief) is proposed, which uses the
 relationship between events to establish the event level 1) DTR [16]: a decision-tree-based ranking model to
social graph. It aggregates the fusion feature of post level identify trending rumors through ranking the clustered
and the interaction clues of event level social graph, and disputed factual claims based on statistical features.
improves the performance of rumor detection. After
2) SVM-RBF [17]: a rumor detecting method using
constructing the event level social graph G  ( Node, Edge) , manual features and SVM classifier with RBF kernel
by substituting A and F to Eq. (6) over three layers, the function. The hand-worked features are extracted from
equations for ELGCN are given as fellows: Weibo.
3) RvNN [5]: a rumor detecting approach based on tree-
 H (3)  ( Aˆ ( Aˆ ( AFW
ˆ (0)
)W (1) )W (2) )  structured recursive neural networks. It learns post
representations via event propagation.
where H (3)  Rnv6 represent the output-layer feature
4) PPC_RNN+CNN [6]: an early detection approach of
matrix of three-layer ELGCN. W (0)  R ( d  v3 )v4 , fake news through classifying propagation paths. They
W (1)  R ( d  v4 )v5 and W (2)  R ( d  v5 )v6 are the trainable construct the paths as multivariate time series and build a
weight matrixes of ELGCN. time series classifier incorporating RNN and CNN.
E. Rumor Detection Module B. Result Analysis
After the above model, we get the updated node Experimental Result: from Table II, it shows that the
characteristic matrix H (3)  [h1 , h2 , h3 ,..., hn ]T . The label yˆi rumor detection model proposed by our research is better
than traditional classifiers and the other classifiers based on
the event is calculated via several full connection layers and other neural networks. In terms of accuracy, the accuracy of
a softmax layer: our model is 12.5%, 3.5% and 2.7% higher than SVM-RBF,
RvNN and PPC_RNN+CNN respectively on the Weibo
 yˆi  softmax (FC (hi ))  dataset. The F1 values of positive samples and negative
samples were 2.3% and 3% higher than those of RvNN
 L   yi log( yˆi )  respectively. The Recall of positive samples and the Recall
i of negative samples are 2.3% and 3% higher than those of
RvNN respectively. The increase of Recall shows that this
where yˆi  R1C is the probability vector for all the method is more sensitive to rumor events, it can reduce the
misjudgment rate of rumor events, find more rumor events to
classes used to predict the label of event ci , C is the reduce the adverse effects of rumor events. Obviously, the
number of categories, hi is the updated event node multilevel graph convolution neural network model
representation, yi is the real label and L is the cross including post level social graph and event level social graph
can improve the classification ability of the model to rumor
entropy loss function. information to a certain extent.
IV. EXPERIMENTS AND ANALYSIS
TABLE II. RUMOR DETECTION RESULTS
A. Dataset and Experiment Settings Method Class Acc. Prec. Recall F1
We evaluate the proposed method on the real-world DTR
F
0.732
0.738 0.715 0.726
datasets: Weibo[13]. Weibo is the most popular social media T 0.726 0.749 0.737
sites in China. It includes two categories of labels, which are F 0.822 0.812 0.817
SVM-RBF 0.818
False Rumor (F) and True Rumor (T). The statistics of the T 0.815 0.824 0.819
F 0.912 0.897 0.905
dataset are shown in Table I. The Doc2vec model [14] is RvNN
T
0.908
0.904 0.918 0.911
used to generate the 300-dimensional text vector of the post. PPC_RNN F 0.884 0.957 0.919
In the PLGCN module, the hidden feature vector dimension 0.916
+CNN T 0.955 0.876 0.913
is 200-dimensional, and the output vector dimension is 100- F 0.956 0.929 0.942
MGCN 0.943
dimensional. In the ELGCN module, the hidden feature T 0.930 0.956 0.943
vector dimension is 500 dimensions, and the output vector
dimension is 64 dimensions. The rate of dropout is 0.3 and Ablation Study: To analyze the effect of each variant in
the learning rate is 0.001. Moreover, the Adam algorithm is MGCN on rumor detection, a set of ablation experiments is
applied to optimize the model. The loss function adopts cross conducted. The experimental results are shown in Fig 2.
entropy loss function. The training process is iterated upon UPUE represents a model that uses unweighted post level
200 epochs, and early stopping[15] is applied when the graph and unweighted event level graph, WPUE represents
validation loss stops decreasing by 10 epochs. the model which uses weighted post level graph and
unweighted event level graph, UPWE represents the model
TABLE I. STATISTICS OF THE DATASET which uses unweighted post level graph and weighted event
level graph, PLGCN indicates that only the Post Level graph
Statistic Weibo convolution model is used, and ELGCN indicates that only
# of Events 4664 the Event Level graph convolution model is used. The
# of Rumors 2351
# of Non-rumors 2313
accuracy is only 87% when using two unweighted graphs.
# of Posts 3,805,656 Adding weighted post level graph and weighted event level
# of Users 2,746,818 graph respectively, the accuracy is improved by 4% and
2.2% respectively. It can be concluded that the effect of
We compare the proposed method with some state-of- rumor detection can be greatly improved by the different
the-art methods, including: importance of response posts and the relevance of events.

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 The accuracy of PLGCN model is only 76%, and the
performance of the original model is severely degraded. The
accuracy of ELGCN model can reach 91%, but it is still
2.7% lower than MGCN. It can be inferred that both PLGCN
and ELGCN are inseparable in our model, and each plays an
important role in MGCN model. It shows that the fusion
features of multilevel graph convolution neural network help
to improve the performance of the model.
Fig. 2. The results of ablation experiment.
V. CONCLUSION
The proposed MGCN model for rumor detection uses a
multilevel graph convolution model including post level and
event level is proposed to detect rumors. For post level graph
convolution network based on propagation relationship, it
uses a graph convolution network with rumor propagation
graph to learn post level feature. For event level graph
convolution based on event interaction relationship, a graph
convolution network with event relationship graph is applied
to bridge post level feature and event interaction information
to obtain the feature representation of events. The results of
the experiments on the Sina Weibo show that this method
can improve the accuracy of the model compared with the
baseline method. In the future, our next research step will
focus on improving the feature fusion and GCN
representation models to achieve more efficient and accurate
rumor detection.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was supported in part by the National Natural
Science Foundation of China (Grant No. U1703261 ). The
corresponding author is Shouzhi Xu.
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