Hongyan Mao

As one of the most popular social media platforms, microblogs are ideal places for news propagation. In microblogs, tweets with both text and images are more likely to attract attention than text-only tweets. This advantage is exploited by fake news producers to publish fake news, which has a devasting impact on individuals and society. Thus, multimodal fake news detection has attracted the attention of many researchers. For news with text and image, multimodal fake news detection utilizes both text and image information to determine the authenticity of news. Most of the existing methods for multimodal fake news detection obtain a joint representation by simply concatenating a vector representation of the text and a visual representation of the image, which ignores the dependencies between them. Although there are a small number of approaches that use the attention mechanism to fuse them, they are not fine-grained enough in feature fusion. The reason is that, for a given image, there are multiple visual features and certain correlations between these features. They do not use multiple feature vectors representing different visual features to fuse with textual features, and ignore the correlations, resulting in inadequate fusion of textual features and visual features. In this paper, we propose a novel fine-grained multimodal fusion network (FMFN) to fully fuse textual features and visual features for fake news detection. Scaled dot-product attention is utilized to fuse word embeddings of words in the text and multiple feature vectors representing different features of the image, which not only considers the correlations between different visual features but also better captures the dependencies between textual features and visual features. We conduct extensive experiments on a public Weibo dataset. Our approach achieves competitive results compared with other methods for fusing visual representation and text representation, which demonstrates that the joint representation learned by the FMFN (which fuses multiple visual features and multiple textual features) is better than the joint representation obtained by fusing a visual representation and a text representation in determining fake news.

Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging is one of the most important tasks in the field of natural language processing (NLP). POS tagging for a word depends not only on the word itself but also on its position, its surrounding words, and their POS tags. POS tagging can be an upstream task for other NLP tasks, further improving their performance. Therefore, it is important to improve the accuracy of POS tagging. In POS tagging, bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) is commonly used and achieves good performance. However, Bi-LSTM is not as powerful as Transformer in leveraging contextual information, since Bi-LSTM simply concatenates the contextual information from left-to-right and right-to-left. In this study, we propose a novel approach for POS tagging to improve the accuracy. For each token, all possible POS tags are obtained without considering context, and then rules are applied to prune out these possible POS tags, which we call rule-based data preprocessing. In this way, the number of possible POS tags of most tokens can be reduced to one, and they are considered to be correctly tagged. Finally, POS tags of the remaining tokens are masked, and a model based on Transformer is used to only predict the masked POS tags, which enables it to leverage bidirectional contexts. Our experimental result shows that our approach leads to better performance than other methods using Bi-LSTM.