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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.
Gorrell et al. (Tue,) studied this question.