UWaterloo at SemEval-2017 Task 8: Detecting Stance towards Rumours with Topic Independent Features

Hareesh Bahuleyan, Olga Vechtomova


Abstract
This paper describes our system for subtask-A: SDQC for RumourEval, task-8 of SemEval 2017. Identifying rumours, especially for breaking news events as they unfold, is a challenging task due to the absence of sufficient information about the exact rumour stories circulating on social media. Determining the stance of Twitter users towards rumourous messages could provide an indirect way of identifying potential rumours. The proposed approach makes use of topic independent features from two categories, namely cue features and message specific features to fit a gradient boosting classifier. With an accuracy of 0.78, our system achieved the second best performance on subtask-A of RumourEval.
Anthology ID:
S17-2080
Volume:
Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2017)
Month:
August
Year:
2017
Address:
Vancouver, Canada
Venue:
SemEval
SIGs:
SIGLEX | SIGSEM
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
461–464
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/S17-2080
DOI:
10.18653/v1/S17-2080
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hareesh Bahuleyan and Olga Vechtomova. 2017. UWaterloo at SemEval-2017 Task 8: Detecting Stance towards Rumours with Topic Independent Features. In Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2017), pages 461–464, Vancouver, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
UWaterloo at SemEval-2017 Task 8: Detecting Stance towards Rumours with Topic Independent Features (Bahuleyan & Vechtomova, SemEval 2017)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/update-css-js/S17-2080.pdf