Cross-Task Rumor Detection: Model Optimization Based on Model Transfer Learning and Graph Convolutional Neural Networks (GCNs)

With the widespread adoption of social media, the rapid dissemination of rumors poses a severe threat to public perception and social stability, emerging as a major challenge confronting society. Hence, the development of efficient and accurate rumor detection models has become an urgent need. Given the challenges of rumor detection tasks, including data scarcity, feature complexity, and difficulties in cross-task knowledge transfer, this paper proposes a BERT–GCN–Transfer Learning model, an integrated rumor detection model that combines BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs), and transfer learning techniques. By harnessing BERT’s robust text representation capabilities, the GCN’s feature extraction prowess on graph-structured data, and the advantage of transfer learning in cross-task knowledge sharing, the model achieves effective rumor detection on social media platforms. Experimental results indicate that this model achieves accuracies of 0.878 and 0.892 on the Twitter15 and Twitter16 datasets, respectively, significantly enhancing the accuracy of rumor detection compared to baseline models. Moreover, it greatly improves the efficiency of model training.