Heterogeneous graph neural network via knowledge relations for fake news detection

The proliferation of fake news in social media has been recognized as a severe problem for society, and substantial attempts have been devoted to fake news detection to alleviate the detrimental impacts. Knowledge graphs (KGs) comprise rich factual relations among real entities, which could be utilized as ground-truth databases and enhance fake news detection. However, most of the existing methods only leveraged natural language processing and graph mining techniques to extract features of fake news for detection and rarely explored the ground knowledge in knowledge graphs. In this work, we propose a novel Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network via Knowledge Relations for Fake News Detection (HGNNR4FD). The devised framework has four major components: 1) A heterogeneous graph (HG) built upon news content, including three types of nodes, i.e., news, entities, and topics, and their relations. 2) A KG that provides the factual basis for detecting fake news by generating embeddings via relations in the KG. 3) A novel attention-based heterogeneous graph neural network that can aggregate information from HG and KG, and 4) a fake news detector, which is capable of identifying fake news based on the news embeddings generated by HGNNR4FD. We further validate the performance of our method by comparison with seven state-of-art baselines and verify the effectiveness of the components through a thorough ablation analysis. From the results, we empirically demonstrate that our framework achieves superior results and yields improvement over the baselines regarding evaluation metrics of accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score on four real-world datasets.