Natural Language Processing Research

3.1.1. Characterizing features

Real-world deceptive situations are high-stakes, where there is much to be gained or lost if deception succeeds or fails; it is hypothesized that these conditions are more likely to elicit salient cues to deception. Current studies tend to employ more text-based cues instead of nonverbal ones. For example, existing meta-analysis of verbal and nonverbal cues for deception deception shows that verbal cues are more reliable, robust and cost-effective than nonverbal cues [37]. However, it is noted that simple content-related n-grams and shallow part-of-speech (POS) tagging have proven insufficient for the detection task, often failing to account for important context information. Rather, these methods have been proven useful only when combined with more complex methods of analysis. Deep Syntax analysis, e.g., using Probabilistic Context Free Grammars (PCFG) has been proven particularly valuable in combination with n-gram methods [38]. In the following subsection, we will give a general review on the commonly used feature representations for misinformation detection.

TF-IDF: The most frequently adopted feature set is the vectorized Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) of n-grams. This is a weighted measure of how often a particular n-gram occurs in a document relative to how often n-gram occurs across all documents in a corpus. These patterns will be highly sensitive to the particular news cycle. Usually TF-IDF is calculated for each n-gram within each document and built for a sparse matrix of the resulting features. It can also be applied to any other types of features with the retain of frequency information.

Knowledge Representations: In addition to n-grams, information can be represented by the knowledge extracted from it. Knowledge here is usually defined as a set of triple tuple containing Subject, Predicate and Object (SPO) extracted from texts. For instance, the SPO tuple (DonaldTrump, Profession, President) is the extracted knowledge from the sentence Donald Trump is the president of the U.S., and it can represent the content of the sentence. When detecting misinformation, knowledge within a Knowledge Graph (KG) or a Knowledge base (KB) is regarded as ground truth datasets containing massive manually-processed relational knowledge from the open Web. Specifically, the detection process is to evaluate the truthfulness of information by checking the compatibility of knowledge extracted from the content in comparison to the gold knowledge representations.

However, there are some deficiencies of the knowledge-based approach to detect misinformation. First, knowledge within a KG or a KB is far from complete and thus it demands further post-processing approaches for knowledge inference (e.g., [39,40]). Second, as the information online keeps changing instantly, the knowledge within a KG or a KB should also be timely updated. In this case, problems will reside in the construction of such resources when applying the knowledge-based approach to detect misinformation.

Domain-specific Features: Domain-specific features are specifically aligned to certain domains, such as quoted words, external links, number of graphs and the average length of graphs, etc. Moreover, other features can be specifically designed to capture the deceptive cues in writing styles to differentiate misinformation, such as lying detection features. Inspired by psychological theories such as Undeutsch hypothesis [41] for deception analysis, misinformation is considered as potentially different in writing style from true information. Thus, information content can also be represented by its writing style at multi-levels. Such representation then can be utilized as features to predict misinformation using machine learning methods.

Latent Representation: Via matrix or tensor factorization or neural network models in deep learning (e.g., CNN, RNN, LSTM, attention network, memory network, etc.), latent features of information content can be extracted automatically without hand-crafted features. Such representation methods save time and labor compared to feature engineering, but the selection or extraction of latent features is often driven by prior experience or techniques without sufficient theoretical basis. Therefore, it is challenging to understand and interpret the generated features learned by latent representation methods.

Linguistic Cues: Recently, researchers have become increasingly interested in the linguistic devices by which information quality is encoded. A variety of linguistic cues that might be associated with perceived information quality have been identified. Linguistic-based features are extracted from the text content in terms of document organizations from different levels, such as characters, words, sentences and documents. These cues act as an essential basis for the automatic detection of high-credibility information. It is therefore reasonable to exploit linguistic features that capture the different linguistic properties and sensational headlines to detect misinformation. To capture the intrinsic properties of misinformation, existing works mainly investigate common linguistic features including

• Lexical Features: Lexical features include character level and word-level features mainly based on the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) (e.g. [30,42]). For word sequences, pre-trained word embedding vectors such as word2vec [43] and GloVe [44] are commonly used. Among lexical features, the simplest method of representing texts is the “bag-of-words” approach, which regard each word as a single, equally significant unit. For the bag-of-words approach, individual words or “n-grams” (multiword) frequencies are aggregated and analyzed to reveal cues of deception. Further tagging of words into respective lexical cues, e.g., parts of speech or “shallow syntax” [45] affective dimensions [37] or eventuality words [9] are all ways of providing frequency sets to reveal linguistic cues of deception.

  The simplicity of this representation also leads to its biggest shortcoming. In addition to relying exclusively on language, the method relies on isolated n-grams without utilizing context information. In this method, any resolution of ambiguous word sense remains nonexistent. Many deception detection researchers have found this method useful in tandem with in-depth complementary analysis.

• Syntactic Features: Syntactic features include grammatical and structural features, such as frequency of function words and phrases (i.e., constituents) or punctuations and POS tagging. Syntactic features can be further divided into shallow syntactic features and deep syntactic features [38]. Shallow syntactic features include the frequency of POS tags and punctuations; whereas the deep syntactic features investigates the frequency of productions such as rewritten rules. The rewritten rules of a sentence within an article can be obtained based on Probability Context Free Grammar (PCFG) parsing trees. Then the rewritten-rule statistics can be calculated based on TF-IDF [42]. For example, noun and verb phrases are in turn rewritten by their syntactic constituent parts [38]. Third-party tools, such as the Stanford Parser, AutoSlog-TS syntax analysis, assist in the automation. However, simply syntax analysis might not be sufficiently capable of identifying deception, and studies often combine this approach with other linguistic or network analysis techniques.

• Semantic Features: Inspired by fundamental theories initially developed in forensic- and social-psychology, semantic-level features investigate some psycho-linguistic attributes by analyzing sentiment, informality, diversity, subjectivity [46], cognitive and perceptual processes in the texts, as well as the quantity information such as the total or average number of characters, words, sentences and paragraphs. These attributes are extracted as high-level features to detect false information within the texts. Tools for the feature extraction can be LIWC for the sentiment, informality, cognitive and perceptual process analysis, and NLTK packages for diversity and quantity analysis.

• Discourse Features: Rhetorical approach is usually applied to extract features at discourse-level based on Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), which is an analytic framework to examine the coherence of a story. Combined with Vector Space Model (VSM), RST is often used for misinformation detection [47]. It investigates the relative or standardized frequencies of rhetorical relationships among sentences within a piece of information. Through defining functional relations such as Circumstance, Evidence and Purpose of text units, RST can systematically identify the essential idea and analyze the characteristics of the input text. Misinformation is then identified according to its coherence and discourse structure.

  To explain the results by RST, VSM is used to convert documents/texts into vectors, which are compared to the center of true or fake information in high-dimensional RST space. Each dimension of the vector space indicates the number of rhetorical relations in the text.

  In addition to the rhetorical approach, Karimi and Tang [48] propose a Hierarchical Discourse-level Structure Framework (HDSF) for misinformation detection. HDSF automatically learns and constructs a discourse-level structure for fake or real articles in an end-to-end manner based on the dependency parsing at the sentence level. Specifically, the framework learns inter-discourse dependencies by utilizing BiLSTM network, and then constructs discourse dependency tree and finally learns the structural document-level representation to do misinformation classification. Further structural analysis also suggests that there are substantial differences in the hierarchical discourse-level structures between true and false information.

Complexity Cues: In real-word settings, misinformation creators may control well on strategic verbal cues (e.g., content words and topical keywords) to anti-detect the lying behavior. Therefore, strategic cues may become less effective for misinformation discrimination. By contrast, nonstrategic cues (e.g., some function words, emotional words and cognitive complexity words, syntactic patterns), as a reflection of the liars' emotional and cognitive states, can leak out of the liar's head in a near-unconscious way. This renders a higher chance of success in deception detection by tracing language complexity cues. Regarding the measurement of complexity in indexing lying statements, existing studies have almost been based on the same hypothesis: false statements are more complex than true statements as deception is assumed to be cognitively more demanding than telling the truth.

Pallotti [49] underlines the polysemy of complexity in literature and summarizes the different notions of complexity in this field by referring to three main meanings: 1) structural complexity, a formal property of texts and linguistic systems having to do with the number of their elements and their relational patterns; 2) cognitive complexity, having to do with the processing costs associated with linguistic structures and 3) developmental complexity, the order in which linguistic structures emerge and are mastered in second (and, possibly, first) language acquisition. The representation and computation of complexity in a piece of information seems a complex problem, which calls for a multi-facet investigation. For more discussion on computing complexity, works in addressing syntactic complexity can be found in [50,51].

Current studies of loaning complexity device mainly focus on a few lexical semantic categories, such as negative emotion verbs, or cognitive complexity features, or motion words [35,52]. A vital problem is that these are largely sparse and lexically biased for representing the full picture of a cognitively complicated event–language. Although many studies utilized n-grams or syntactic features for measuring structural complexity, the investigated complexity cues are far from representing language complexity, which is complicated and should not be represented from any single perspective.

3.2.1. Problem formulation

In this subsection, we present three basic categories of problem formulation for misinformation detection from the NLP perspective, which are detailed as follows:

Classification: A simplest case of misinformation detection can be defined as a binary classification problem to predict a piece of information as true or false. However, the binary classification formulation is not efficient in the cases that the information is partially real and partially fake. To address this problem, misinformation detection can also be formulated as a fine-grained multi-classification problem by adding additional classes to datasets. For example, LIAR consists of short political statements classified as pants-fire, false, barely-true, half-true, mostly-true and true. When using the datasets with multi-class labels, the expected outputs are multi-class labels and the labels are learned independently [29,34].

Regression: Misinformation detection can also be formulated as a regression task. For example, Nakashole and Mitchell [53] formulate the task by outputting a numeric score of truthfulness. With license to regression, the evaluation can be done by calculating the difference between the predicted scores and the ground truth scores, or using Pearson/Spearman Correlation tests. However, since the available datasets have discrete ground truth labels, the regression formulation becomes problematic because converting the discrete labels to numeric scores seems a challenging task.

Clustering: Misinformation detection is usually formulated as a supervised learning problem given an annotated dataset with labels. However, real-world data is more often without any labels. Semi-supervised and unsupervised methods are hence proposed to develop misinformation detection systems by formulating it as a clustering problem [4]. For instance, Guacho et al. [54] propose a semi-supervised method for content-based detection of misinformation via tensor embeddings. They initiate the work in representing collections of articles as multi-dimensional tensors, leveraging tensor decomposition to derive concise article embeddings that capture spatial/contextual information about each article. Yang et al. [55] propose an unsupervised method to infer the quality of information based on the users' credibility. They consider users' credibility as latent random variables which somehow reflect their opinions toward the authenticity of information.

Among the above three formulations, most existing approaches to misinformation detection rely on the supervised learning, which requires an annotated gold standard dataset to train a model. However, a reliable annotated dataset with labels of misinformation degrees is usually time-consuming and human-laboring. It often requires expert annotators to do careful analysis with the provision of additional evidence and contexts from authoritative sources. Thus, in real scenarios, it is more practical to learn semi-supervised or unsupervised models given limited or no labeled dataset.

3.2.2. Algorithms and models

Many studies in misinformation detection have employed machine learning algorithms. The major technique can be generalized as a binary or multiple classification task with the use of predicative modelling on features at multiple levels (see Section 3.1.1). In general, commonly adopted models of misinformation detection in NLP include two main categories as follows:

Statistical Models: The most commonly used statistical models in misinformation detection are Support Vector Machine (SVM) [56] and Naïve Bayes Classifier (NBC) [57]. The construction of the two models is quite easy and fast, yet with outstanding performance in most cases. When a mathematical model is sufficiently trained from pre-labelled examples in one of two categories, it can predict instances of future deception on the basis of numeric clustering and distances. The use of different clustering methods and distance functions between data points shape the accuracy of SVM, which invites new experimentation on the net effect of these variables. Naïve Bayes algorithms make classifications based on accumulated evidence of the correlation between a given variable (e.g., n-gram) and the other variables present in the model. In addition to SVM and NBC, there are many other frequently adopted statistical models for misinformation detection, including, e.g., Logistic Regression (LR), K-Nearest-Neighbourhood (KNN), Decision Tree and Random Forest Classifier (RFC). They have shown different strengths in predicting misinformation in relation to various feature representations.

For example, Gilda [58] adopted several multiple classification algorithms, i.e., SVMs, Stochastic Gradient Descent, Gradient Boosting, Bounded Decision Trees and Random Forests and found that TF-IDF of bi-grams fed into a Stochastic Gradient Descent model achieves the best performance (77.2% accuracy). Feng, Banerjee and Choi [38] utilized syntactic cues and achieved 85%-91% accuracy in deception related classification tasks by testing on online review corpora. On the basis of this work, Feng and Hirst [59] conducted a semantic analysis with “object:descriptor” pairs for locating semantic contradictions and got further improvement of detection accuracy. Rubin, Lukoianova and Tatiana [60] analyzed rhetorical structure using a VSM with similar success. Ciampaglia et al. [61] employed language pattern similarity networks with a pre-existing KB and achieved a superior performance over the state-of-the-art methods. These works in applying statistical models to misinformation detection tend to suggest the effectiveness of modelling complex and deep features compared to superficial features, such as bag-of-words. The comparison of the features, statistical models and performances in these studies is summarized in Table 2.

Neural Networks: Early studies on misinformation detection rely on hand-crafted feature extraction to train machine learning models. However, the process of feature engineering can be time-consuming. With the advancement of neural networks, recent studies of misinformation detection have witnessed the critical role of deep learning methods in place of traditional machine learning models. For example, Rashkin et al. [34] added LIWC to a LSTM model which, however, performed unexpectedly worse than the baseline, while the case for the Naive Bayes model is improved. In addition to LSTM, recent research also proves the efficiency of RNN-based models to represent sequential posts and user engagements [62–64]. Many studies also adopt CNN-based models to capture local features of texts and images [65,66]. Furthermore, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are often used to obtain fundamental features for texts across different topics or domains, which can be applied to misinformation detection in future research. However, one major problem of deep learning models is that they often require massive training data and substantial training time, also for parameter tuning, and the performance of deep learning models is usually difficult to interpret. As a summary to research in this field, we compare the features, deep learning models and top performances in some representative works in Table 3.

4.1.1. Identify check-worthy features

As content-only cues are insufficient and sometimes unreliable for misinformation detection, identifying check-worthy features may serve as an alternative way for improving the efficiency of misinformation detection. For instance, to identify whether a given topic or content is worth checking, analysis to the topic, website, domain, language, culture, etc., can be a potential research direction for enhancing misinformation detection. Additionally, other related tasks as mentioned in Section 1.2 can serve as facilitating mechanisms to help detect misinformation, such as applying summarization models to check the main idea of the information and using stance detection to find out the argument of the information creator, which are important cues for the classification of misinformation degrees.

4.1.2. Detect early stage propagation patterns

One of the challenging tasks for misinformation detection is to identify misinformation at early stages before its fast propagation. Therefore, detecting misinformation at an early stage of propagation can be a significant step to mitigate and intervene misinformation. For example, Ramezani et al. [67] propose a model considering earliness both in modeling and prediction. The proposed method utilizes RNN with a new loss function and a new stopping rule. First, the context of news is embedded with a class-specific text representation. Then, the model utilizes available public profile of users and speed of news diffusion for early labeling of misinformation. Their experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of their model which outperforms the competitive methods in term of accuracy while detecting in an earlier stage.

4.2.1. Incorporate multi-source data

Most previous research on misinformation detection mainly rely on the content as input, but recent studies have shown that incorporating additional information, such as speaker profiles [68] or social engagement data can further improve the accuracy of detection systems. A case study in Kirilin and Strube [69] shows that the attention model pays more attention to speaker's credibility than a statement of claim. Long et al. [68] added speaker profiles such as party affiliation, speaker title, location and credibility history into LSTM model and outperformed the state-of-the-art method by 14.5% in accuracy using a benchmark dataset. Moreover, social engagements data also proves to be effective for misinformation detection [11]. With the advancement of graph neural networks, recent studies also integrate multi-source data into a graph network [70,71]. By constructing a heterogeneous graph, the relationships among multi-source data about misinformation, such as the creator, the content and the corresponding subject/theme can be learned and updated by graph neural networks (i.e., Graph Convolutional Network [72], Graph Attention Network [73]). However, one problem is that relying judgments on speakers, creators, publishers or social networks may cause some risks. As Vlachos puts it, the most dangerous misinformation comes from the sources we trust, and upgrading or downgrading specific sources will silence minorities' voice [74].

4.2.2. Multi-modal representation

Social media information often contains both text and visual content (e.g., image and videos), and each has both focused and complementary information. Therefore, for misinformation detection, it is necessary to use the multi-modal detection approach by integrating the text and visual information to assess the truthfulness of the information. Among the existing works, representative methods include attRNN [75], EANN [76] and MVAE [77].

For example, Jin et al. [75] introduced multi-modal information into fake news detection for the first time through deep neural networks. They proposed a RNN-based model (attRNN) with attention mechanism to integrate text and visual information. Experiments showed that this method is able to recognize misinformation that is difficult to discriminate by using a single modal information. Wang et al. [76] propose an end-to-end model based on adversarial networks. The motivation is that many current models learn event-related features that are difficult to migrate to newly emerged events. In this method, TextCNN is applied to extract semantic features of the text, and VGG-19 is used to extract semantic features of visual content. The multi-modal features are then concatenated to represent the content of misinformation and also achieved promising results. Dhruv et al. [77] argues that the simple concatenation of text and visual features is insufficient to fully express the interaction and relation between the two modal information. Therefore, they propose an encoding-decoding method to construct multi-modal feature representation. In this model, the concatenated features of texts and visual content are encoded as an intermediate expression, and a reconstructed loss is used to ensure that the encoded intermediate expression can be decoded back to the original state, and then the intermediate expression vector is used for misinformation detection.

Although many multi-modal resolutions have been sought, the current multi-modal approach to misinformation detection faces two major challenges. The first challenge is that high-quality annotated multi-modal misinformation datasets are in a scarce state. The other challenge is that despite building larger datasets, unsupervised or semi-supervised methods for misinformation detection should be developed when dealing with unlabeled data.