On Unifying Misinformation Detection

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce UNIFIEDM2, a general-purpose misinformation model that jointly models multiple domains of misinformation with a single, unified setup. The model is trained to handle four tasks: detecting news bias, clickbait, fake news and verifying rumors. By grouping these tasks together, UNIFIEDM2 learns a richer representation of misinformation, which leads to state-of-the-art or comparable performance across all tasks. Furthermore, we demonstrate that UNIFIEDM2’s learned representation is helpful for few-shot learning of unseen misinformation tasks/datasets and model’s generalizability to unseen events.