English

Can Large Language Models Detect Rumors on Social Media?

Information Retrieval 2024-02-09 v2 Computation and Language

Abstract

In this work, we investigate to use Large Language Models (LLMs) for rumor detection on social media. However, it is challenging for LLMs to reason over the entire propagation information on social media, which contains news contents and numerous comments, due to LLMs may not concentrate on key clues in the complex propagation information, and have trouble in reasoning when facing massive and redundant information. Accordingly, we propose an LLM-empowered Rumor Detection (LeRuD) approach, in which we design prompts to teach LLMs to reason over important clues in news and comments, and divide the entire propagation information into a Chain-of-Propagation for reducing LLMs' burden. We conduct extensive experiments on the Twitter and Weibo datasets, and LeRuD outperforms several state-of-the-art rumor detection models by 3.2% to 7.7%. Meanwhile, by applying LLMs, LeRuD requires no data for training, and thus shows more promising rumor detection ability in few-shot or zero-shot scenarios.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2402.03916,
  title  = {Can Large Language Models Detect Rumors on Social Media?},
  author = {Qiang Liu and Xiang Tao and Junfei Wu and Shu Wu and Liang Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.03916},
  year   = {2024}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T14:40:00.148Z