Evaluating Event Credibility on Twitter

Though Twitter acts as a realtime news source with people acting as sensors and sending event updates from all over the world, rumors spread via Twitter have been noted to cause considerable damage. Given a set of popular Twitter events along with related users and tweets, we study the problem of automatically assessing the credibility of such events. We propose a credibility analysis approach enhanced with event graph-based optimization to solve the problem. First we experiment by performing PageRanklike credibility propagation on a multi-typed network consisting of events, tweets, and users. Further, within each iteration, we enhance the basic trust analysis by updating event credibility scores using regularization on a new graph of events. Our experiments using events extracted from two tweet feed datasets, each with millions of tweets show that our event graph optimization approach outperforms the basic credibility analysis approach. Also, our methods are significantly more accurate (∼86%) than the decision tree classifier approach (∼72%).