Misinformation with Legal Consequences (MisLC): A New Task Towards Harnessing Societal Harm of Misinformation

Chu Fei Luo, Radin Shayanfar, Rohan Bhambhoria, Samuel Dahan, Xiaodan Zhu


Abstract
Misinformation, defined as false or inaccurate information, can result in significant societal harm when it is spread with malicious or even unintentional intent. The rapid online information exchange necessitates advanced detection mechanisms to mitigate misinformation-induced harm. Existing research, however, has predominantly focused on the veracity of information, overlooking the legal implications and consequences of misinformation. In this work, we take a novel angle to consolidate the definition of misinformation detection using legal issues as a measurement of societal ramifications, aiming to bring interdisciplinary efforts to tackle misinformation and its consequence. We introduce a new task: Misinformation with Legal Consequence (MisLC), which leverages definitions from a wide range of legal domains covering 4 broader legal topics and 11 fine-grained legal issues, including hate speech, election laws, and privacy regulations. For this task, we advocate a two-step dataset curation approach that utilizes crowd-sourced checkworthiness and expert evaluations of misinformation. We provide insights about the MisLC task through empirical evidence, from the problem definition to experiments and expert involvement. While the latest large language models and retrieval-augmented generation are effective baselines for the task, we find they are still far from replicating expert performance.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.924
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
15749–15768
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.924
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chu Fei Luo, Radin Shayanfar, Rohan Bhambhoria, Samuel Dahan, and Xiaodan Zhu. 2024. Misinformation with Legal Consequences (MisLC): A New Task Towards Harnessing Societal Harm of Misinformation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 15749–15768, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Misinformation with Legal Consequences (MisLC): A New Task Towards Harnessing Societal Harm of Misinformation (Luo et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.924.pdf