Deep Learning-Based Rumor Detection on Microblogging Platforms: A Systematic Review

With the rapid increase in the popularity of social networks, the propagation of rumors is also increasing. Rumors can spread among thousands of users immediately without verification and can cause serious damages. Recently, several research studies have been investigated to control online rumors automatically by mining rich text available on the open network with deep learning techniques. In this paper, we conducted a systematic literature review for rumor detection using deep neural network approaches. A total of 108 studies were retrieved using manual research from five databases (IEEE Explore, Springer Link, Science Direct, ACM Digital Library, and Google Scholar). The considered studies are then examined in our systematic review to answer the seven research questions that we have formulated to deeply understand the overall trends in the use of deep learning methods for rumor detection. Apart from this, our systematic review also presents the challenges and issues that are faced by the researchers in this area and suggests promising future research directions. Our review will be beneficial for researchers in this domain as it will facilitate researchers’ comparison with the existing works due to the availability of a complete description of the used performance matrices, dataset characteristics, and the deep learning model used per each work. Our review will also assist researchers in finding the available annotated datasets that can be used as benchmarks for comparing their new proposed approaches with the existing state-of-the-art works.