Linguistic Cues of Deception in a Multilingual April Fools' Day Context

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Greek April Fools' Day news dataset with linguistic features, compares it to English data, and evaluates deception detection classifiers across languages, highlighting the value of such datasets.

Contribution

It provides a new Greek AFD corpus, analyzes linguistic deception cues, and explores monolingual and crosslingual deception detection methods.

Findings

AFD datasets aid deception detection research

Linguistic cues show consistency across languages

Crosslingual classifiers perform reasonably well

Abstract

In this work we consider the collection of deceptive April Fools' Day(AFD) news articles as a useful addition in existing datasets for deception detection tasks. Such collections have an established ground truth and are relatively easy to construct across languages. As a result, we introduce a corpus that includes diachronic AFD and normal articles from Greek newspapers and news websites. On top of that, we build a rich linguistic feature set, and analyze and compare its deception cues with the only AFD collection currently available, which is in English. Following a current research thread, we also discuss the individualism/collectivism dimension in deception with respect to these two datasets. Lastly, we build classifiers by testing various monolingual and crosslingual settings. The results showcase that AFD datasets can be helpful in deception detection studies, and are in alignment with the observations of other deception detection works.