PHEME dataset of rumours and non-rumours

In contrast to existing work, our classifier does not need to observe tweets querying a piece of information to deem it a rumour, but instead we detect rumours from the tweet alone by exploiting context learnt during the event. Our classifier achieves competitive performance, beating the state-of-the-art classifier that relies on querying tweets with improved precision and recall, as well as outperforming our best baseline with nearly 40% improvement in terms of F1 score.

The scale and diversity of our experiments reinforces the generalisability of our classifier.<br><br>Data record consists of a zip archive containing sub-folders organised according to event and an accompanying readme file. The data is structured as follows. Each event has a directory, with two subfolders, rumours and non-rumours.

These two folders have folders named with a tweet ID. The tweet itself can be found on the 'source-tweet' directory of the tweet in question, and the directory 'reactions' has the set of tweets responding to that source tweet. Twitter retains the ownership and rights of the content of the tweets.