Using Persuasive Writing Strategies to Explain and Detect Health Misinformation

Danial Kamali, Joseph D. Romain, Huiyi Liu, Wei Peng, Jingbo Meng, Parisa Kordjamshidi


Abstract
Nowadays, the spread of misinformation is a prominent problem in society. Our research focuses on aiding the automatic identification of misinformation by analyzing the persuasive strategies employed in textual documents. We introduce a novel annotation scheme encompassing common persuasive writing tactics to achieve our objective. Additionally, we provide a dataset on health misinformation, thoroughly annotated by experts utilizing our proposed scheme. Our contribution includes proposing a new task of annotating pieces of text with their persuasive writing strategy types. We evaluate fine-tuning and prompt-engineering techniques with pre-trained language models of the BERT family and the generative large language models of the GPT family using persuasive strategies as an additional source of information. We evaluate the effects of employing persuasive strategies as intermediate labels in the context of misinformation detection. Our results show that those strategies enhance accuracy and improve the explainability of misinformation detection models. The persuasive strategies can serve as valuable insights and explanations, enabling other models or even humans to make more informed decisions regarding the trustworthiness of the information.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.1501
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:
17285–17309
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1501
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Danial Kamali, Joseph D. Romain, Huiyi Liu, Wei Peng, Jingbo Meng, and Parisa Kordjamshidi. 2024. Using Persuasive Writing Strategies to Explain and Detect Health Misinformation. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 17285–17309, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Using Persuasive Writing Strategies to Explain and Detect Health Misinformation (Kamali et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1501.pdf
Optional supplementary material:
 2024.lrec-main.1501.OptionalSupplementaryMaterial.zip