Words are the Window to the Soul: Language-based User Representations for Fake News Detection

Marco Del Tredici, Raquel Fernández


Abstract
Cognitive and social traits of individuals are reflected in language use. Moreover, individuals who are prone to spread fake news online often share common traits. Building on these ideas, we introduce a model that creates representations of individuals on social media based only on the language they produce, and use them to detect fake news. We show that language-based user representations are beneficial for this task. We also present an extended analysis of the language of fake news spreaders, showing that its main features are mostly domain independent and consistent across two English datasets. Finally, we exploit the relation between language use and connections in the social graph to assess the presence of the Echo Chamber effect in our data.
Anthology ID:
2020.coling-main.477
Volume:
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona, Spain (Online)
Editors:
Donia Scott, Nuria Bel, Chengqing Zong
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5467–5479
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.477
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.477
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Marco Del Tredici and Raquel Fernández. 2020. Words are the Window to the Soul: Language-based User Representations for Fake News Detection. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 5467–5479, Barcelona, Spain (Online). International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Words are the Window to the Soul: Language-based User Representations for Fake News Detection (Del Tredici & Fernández, COLING 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.477.pdf