A Comparative study of Knowledge Graph Embedding Models for use in Fake News Detection

During the past few years online misinformation, generally referred to as fake news, has been identified as an increasingly dangerous threat. As the spread of misinformation online has increased, fake news detection has become an active line of research. One approach is to use knowledge graphs for the purpose of automated fake news detection. While large scale knowledge graphs are openly available these are rarely up to date, often missing the relevant information needed for the task of fake news detection. Creating new knowledge graphs from online sources is one way to obtain the missing information. However extracting information from unstructured text is far from straightforward. Using Natural Language Processing techniques we developed a pre-processing pipeline for extracting information from text for the purpose of creating knowledge graphs. In order to classify news as fake or not fake with the use of knowledge graphs, these need to be converted into a machine understandable format, called knowledge graph embeddings. These embeddings also allow new information to be inferred or classified based on the already existing information in the knowledge graph. Only one knowledge graph embedding model has previously been used for the purpose of fake news detection while several new models have recently been developed. We compare the performance of three different embedding models, all relying on different fundamental architectures, in the specific context of fake news detection. The models used were the geometric model TransE, the tensor decomposition model ComplEx and the deep learning model ConvKB. The results of this study shows that out of the three models, ConvKB is the best performing. However other aspects than performance need to be considered and as such these results do not necessarily mean that a deep learning approach is the most suitable for real world fake news detection