Studying Dishonest Intentions in Brazilian Portuguese Texts

TL;DR

This paper investigates linguistic cues of deception in Brazilian Portuguese news, revealing lexical, syntactic, semantic, punctuation, and emotional differences between fake and true news to aid deception detection.

Contribution

It provides the first systematic linguistic analysis of deception language in Brazilian Portuguese, identifying key features distinguishing fake from true news.

Findings

Fake news shows lexical and syntactic differences from real news

Semantic and emotional variations are significant indicators of deception

Punctuation patterns differ between truthful and deceptive texts

Abstract

Previous work in the social sciences, psychology and linguistics has show that liars have some control over the content of their stories, however their underlying state of mind may "leak out" through the way that they tell them. To the best of our knowledge, no previous systematic effort exists in order to describe and model deception language for Brazilian Portuguese. To fill this important gap, we carry out an initial empirical linguistic study on false statements in Brazilian news. We methodically analyze linguistic features using a deceptive news corpus, which includes both fake and true news. The results show that they present substantial lexical, syntactic and semantic variations, as well as punctuation and emotion distinctions.