How Entangled is Factuality and Deception in German?
Aswathy Velutharambath, Amelie W\"uhrl, Roman Klinger

TL;DR
This study investigates the relationship between factuality and deception in German texts, testing models' ability to detect deception and its impact on fact checking, revealing that deception detection remains challenging and models struggle with deceptive content.
Contribution
It extends the belief-based deception framework to German, evaluates computational models on deception detection, and examines how deception affects fact checking performance.
Findings
No correlation between deception cues and detection accuracy.
Models perform no better than random chance in deception detection.
Deceptive content reduces fact checking accuracy, but LLM prompts are less affected.
Abstract
The statement "The earth is flat" is factually inaccurate, but if someone truly believes and argues in its favor, it is not deceptive. Research on deception detection and fact checking often conflates factual accuracy with the truthfulness of statements. This assumption makes it difficult to (a) study subtle distinctions and interactions between the two and (b) gauge their effects on downstream tasks. The belief-based deception framework disentangles these properties by defining texts as deceptive when there is a mismatch between what people say and what they truly believe. In this study, we assess if presumed patterns of deception generalize to German language texts. We test the effectiveness of computational models in detecting deception using an established corpus of belief-based argumentation. Finally, we gauge the impact of deception on the downstream task of fact checking and…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
Taxonomy
TopicsLinguistic research and analysis
