Enhancing Perception: Refining Explanations of News Claims with LLM Conversations

Yi-Li Hsu, Jui-Ning Chen, Yang Fan Chiang, Shang-Chien Liu, Aiping Xiong, Lun-Wei Ku


Abstract
We introduce Enhancing Perception, a framework for Large Language Models (LLMs) designed to streamline the time-intensive task typically undertaken by professional fact-checkers of crafting explanations for fake news. This study investigates the effectiveness of enhancing LLM explanations through conversational refinement. We compare various questioner agents, including state-of-the-art LLMs like GPT-4, Claude 2, PaLM 2, and 193 American participants acting as human questioners. Based on the histories of these refinement conversations, we further generate comprehensive summary explanations. We evaluated the effectiveness of these initial, refined, and summary explanations across 40 news claims by involving 2,797 American participants, measuring their self-reported belief change regarding both real and fake claims after receiving the explanations. Our findings reveal that, in the context of fake news, explanations that have undergone conversational refinement—whether by GPT-4 or human questioners, who ask more diverse and detail-oriented questions—were significantly more effective than both the initial unrefined explanations and the summary explanations. Moreover, these refined explanations achieved a level of effectiveness comparable to that of expert-written explanations. The results highlight the potential of automatic explanation refinement by LLMs in debunking fake news claims.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-naacl.137
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Mexico City, Mexico
Editors:
Kevin Duh, Helena Gomez, Steven Bethard
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2129–2147
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-naacl.137
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yi-Li Hsu, Jui-Ning Chen, Yang Fan Chiang, Shang-Chien Liu, Aiping Xiong, and Lun-Wei Ku. 2024. Enhancing Perception: Refining Explanations of News Claims with LLM Conversations. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024, pages 2129–2147, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Enhancing Perception: Refining Explanations of News Claims with LLM Conversations (Hsu et al., Findings 2024)
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https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-naacl.137.pdf
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