DFKI-DKT at SemEval-2017 Task 8: Rumour Detection and Classification using Cascading Heuristics

Abstract

We describe our submissions for SemEval-2017 Task 8, Determining Rumour Veracity and Support for Rumours. The Digital Curation Technologies (DKT) (Rehm and Sasaki, 2016, 2015) team at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) participated in two subtasks: Subtask A (determining the stance of a message) and Subtask B (determining veracity of a message, closed variant). In both cases, our implementation consisted of a Multivariate Logistic Regression (Maximum Entropy) classifier coupled with hand-written patterns and rules (heuristics) applied in a post-process cascading fashion. We provide a detailed analysis of the system performance and report on variants of our systems that were not part of the official submission.