dEFEND

In recent years, to mitigate the problem of fake news, computational detection of fake news has been studied, producing some promising early results. While important, however, we argue that a critical missing piece of the study be the explainability of such detection, i.e., why a particular piece of news is detected as fake. In this paper, therefore, we study the explainable detection of fake news. We develop a sentence-comment co-attention sub-network to exploit both news contents and user comments to jointly capture explainable top-k check-worthy sentences and user comments for fake news detection. We conduct extensive experiments on real-world datasets and demonstrate that the proposed method not only significantly outperforms 7 state-of-the-art fake news detection methods by at least 5.33% in F1-score, but also (concurrently) identifies top-k user comments that explain why a news piece is fake, better than baselines by 28.2% in NDCG and 30.7% in Precision.