Stance Classification in Rumours as a Sequential Task Exploiting the Tree Structure of Social Media Conversations

Understand

Rumour stance classification, the task that determines if each tweet in a collection discussing a rumour is supporting, denying, questioning or simply commenting on the rumour, has been attracting substantial interest.

• Here we introduce a novel approach that makes use of the sequence of transitions observed in tree-structured conversation threads in Twitter.
• The conversation threads are formed by harvesting users' replies to one another, which results in a nested tree-like structure.
• Previous work addressing the stance classification task has treated each tweet as a separate unit.