Abstract

Internet and social media have become significant platforms for sharing real-time information, with rumors significantly affecting billions of people's perceptions. Considerably, Rumor recognition is the most challenging task on social media platforms. Numerous Deep Learning (DL) models have been developed to extract linguistic characteristics from short-text tweets for rumor prediction. However, these models struggles to capture the intricate spatiotemporal relationships presenting tweet interactions. To address this issues, Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformers with Attention based Balanced Spatial-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks (BERT-ABSTGCN) was used. This model incorporates Spatial-Temporal Attention Mechanism (STAM) and a Spatial-Temporal Convolution Module (STCM) to effectively model the spatiotemporal dependencies within in tweet interactions to enhance rumor detection.  However, it constitutes to high degradation problem due to convergence issues. A popular solution to these problems is Residual Learning (RL), which introduces identity mappings to speed up training and enhance gradient propagation. However, traditional RL can only be used for layer-wise task refining, which severely restricts its capacity to grasp more generalized dependencies. However, conventional RL is restricted to layer-wise refinement within a single task limiting its ability to capture broader dependencies. To address this, the proposed work is included with a Cross-Residual Learning (CRL) in BERT-ABSTGCN named BERT with Attention-based Balanced Spatial-Temporal Residual Graph Convolutional Networks (BERT-ABSTRGCN) for efficient rumor detection and stance classification. CRL of BERT-ABSTRGCN enable intuitive learning across multiple tasks like rumor detection and stance classification using cross-connections. CRL establishes direct connections between shallow and deep feature representations, mitigating the vanishing gradient issue.   The fitted residual mappings in the CRL will facilitate the BERT- BERT-ABSTRGCN with the provided information by using the short cut connections and lowers the probability of model degradation. BERT-ABSTRGCN effectively identifies rumor with different stances about specific social media posts, thereby preventing the spread of rumors. Experimental evaluations show that BERT-ABSTRGCN achieves 95.62% accuracy on the PHEME dataset and 90.15% on Mendeley’s COVID-19 rumor dataset, significantly surpassing traditional models.