Exploring the Usability of Persuasion Techniques for Downstream Misinformation-related Classification Tasks

Nikolaos Nikolaidis, Jakub Piskorski, Nicolas Stefanovitch


Abstract
We systematically explore the predictive power of features derived from Persuasion Techniques detected in texts, for solving different tasks of interest for media analysis; notably: detecting mis/disinformation, fake news, propaganda, partisan news and conspiracy theories. Firstly, we propose a set of meaningful features, aiming to capture the persuasiveness of a text. Secondly, we assess the discriminatory power of these features in different text classification tasks on 8 selected datasets from the literature using two metrics. We also evaluate the per-task discriminatory power of each Persuasion Technique and report on different insights. We find out that most of these features have a noticeable potential to distinguish conspiracy theories, hyperpartisan news and propaganda, while we observed mixed results in the context of fake news detection.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.613
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
6992–7006
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.613
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nikolaos Nikolaidis, Jakub Piskorski, and Nicolas Stefanovitch. 2024. Exploring the Usability of Persuasion Techniques for Downstream Misinformation-related Classification Tasks. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 6992–7006, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Exploring the Usability of Persuasion Techniques for Downstream Misinformation-related Classification Tasks (Nikolaidis et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.613.pdf