CREDIBILITY ASSESSMENT IN MICROBLOGS

Abstract

Microblogging platforms such as Twitter allow users to post publicly viewable short messages. Posts shared by users pertaining to real-world events or themes can provide a rich ``on-the-ground'' live update of the events for the benefit of everyone. Unfortunately, not all posted information may be credible, and the same platform can be exploited to spread misinformation across unsuspecting users on the platform. In this thesis, we propose to assess the credibility of microblogs at a finer granularity, using evidence from external sources, and considering the relations between the claims. We source for external independent sources of evidence in the form of Web Search Results (WSRs), identify dependencies between related claims, and use these dependencies to adjust the likelihood estimates of a claim being credible, not credible or inconclusive. We further extend our notion of claims to include temporal information and develop an end-to-end framework for evaluating time-sensitive claims.