Leveraging Community and Author Context to Explain the Performance and Bias of Text-Based Deception Detection Models

Galen Weld, Ellyn Ayton, Tim Althoff, Maria Glenski


Abstract
Deceptive news posts shared in online communities can be detected with NLP models, and much recent research has focused on the development of such models. In this work, we use characteristics of online communities and authors — the context of how and where content is posted — to explain the performance of a neural network deception detection model and identify sub-populations who are disproportionately affected by model accuracy or failure. We examine who is posting the content, and where the content is posted to. We find that while author characteristics are better predictors of deceptive content than community characteristics, both characteristics are strongly correlated with model performance. Traditional performance metrics such as F1 score may fail to capture poor model performance on isolated sub-populations such as specific authors, and as such, more nuanced evaluation of deception detection models is critical.
Anthology ID:
2021.nlp4if-1.5
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on NLP for Internet Freedom: Censorship, Disinformation, and Propaganda
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Anna Feldman, Giovanni Da San Martino, Chris Leberknight, Preslav Nakov
Venue:
NLP4IF
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
29–38
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.nlp4if-1.5
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.nlp4if-1.5
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Galen Weld, Ellyn Ayton, Tim Althoff, and Maria Glenski. 2021. Leveraging Community and Author Context to Explain the Performance and Bias of Text-Based Deception Detection Models. In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on NLP for Internet Freedom: Censorship, Disinformation, and Propaganda, pages 29–38, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Leveraging Community and Author Context to Explain the Performance and Bias of Text-Based Deception Detection Models (Weld et al., NLP4IF 2021)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.nlp4if-1.5.pdf