InfoSurgeon: Cross-media fine-grained information consistency checking for fake news detection

Abstract

To defend against neural system-generated fake news, an effective mechanism is urgently needed. We contribute a novel benchmark for fake news detection at the knowledge element level, as well as a solution for this task which incorporates cross-media consistency checking to detect the fine-grained knowledge elements making news articles misinformative. Due to training data scarcity, we also formulate a novel data synthesis method by manipulating knowledge elements within the knowledge graph to generate noisy training data with specific, hard to detect, known inconsistencies. Our detection approach outperforms the state-of-the-art (up to 16.8% absolute accuracy gain), and more critically, yields fine-grained explanations.