SemEval-2019 Task 7: RumourEval, Determining Rumour Veracity and Support for Rumours

TLDR

Since the first RumourEval shared task in 2017, interest in automated claim validation has surged as fake news becomes a mainstream concern, yet automated support for rumour verification remains in its infancy and requires consideration of evolving conversations and news updates to determine veracity. The shared task aims to sustain focus on automated rumour verification, encouraging continued effort. The dataset comprises dubious social media posts and ensuing conversations annotated for stance and veracity, expanded to include Reddit and new Twitter posts, and defines two tasks: rumour stance prediction and rumour verification. The competition attracted 22 submissions, a 70 % increase from 2017, many employing state‑of‑the‑art methods.

Abstract

Since the first RumourEval shared task in 2017, interest in automated claim validation has greatly increased, as the danger of ``fake news'' has become a mainstream concern. However automated support for rumour verification remains in its infancy. It is therefore important that a shared task in this area continues to provide a focus for effort, which is likely to increase. Rumour verification is characterised by the need to consider evolving conversations and news updates to reach a verdict on a rumour's veracity. As in RumourEval 2017 we provided a dataset of dubious posts and ensuing conversations in social media, annotated both for stance and veracity. The social media rumours stem from a variety of breaking news stories and the dataset is expanded to include Reddit as well as new Twitter posts. There were two concrete tasks; rumour stance prediction and rumour verification, which we present in detail along with results achieved by participants. We received 22 system submissions (a 70\% increase from RumourEval 2017) many of which used state-of-the-art methodology to tackle the challenges involved.