@inproceedings{han-etal-2026-exploring,
title = "Exploring and Distilling Multi-Dimensional Clues for Interpretable Social Bot Detection",
author = "Han, Yi and
Lu, Haiqi and
Liao, Lizi and
Zhou, Shuhan and
Liu, Yuanxing and
Zhang, Weinan and
Liu, Ting",
editor = "Liakata, Maria and
Moreira, Viviane P. and
Zhang, Jiajun and
Jurgens, David",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, California, United States",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1338/",
pages = "28971--28992",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
abstract = "Social bot accounts have long been disseminating disinformation and engaging in malicious activities on social media platforms. Detecting these social bots has become a critical and urgent task, essential for maintaining a healthy online ecosystem. Existing social bot detection research usually provides detection results directly without corresponding supportive explanations, making it difficult to assess the extent to which such predictions are trustworthy. This is a key concern for online moderation. In this work, we explore the detection interpretation and summarize a four-dimensional clue framework from individual and social perspectives. We propose CDRBot, which primarily employs outcome-reward reinforcement learning to train inspectors to generate faithful, grounded, and readable clues from the *User Information*, *Semantic Features*, *Interactive Situation*, and *Behavioral Pattern*. These clues are then integrated to make final predictions. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms other baselines in detection performance. The generated clues are faithful, grounded, and readable, and can significantly enhance the performance of large language models in social bot detection."
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Exploring and Distilling Multi-Dimensional Clues for Interpretable Social Bot Detection
%A Han, Yi
%A Lu, Haiqi
%A Liao, Lizi
%A Zhou, Shuhan
%A Liu, Yuanxing
%A Zhang, Weinan
%A Liu, Ting
%Y Liakata, Maria
%Y Moreira, Viviane P.
%Y Zhang, Jiajun
%Y Jurgens, David
%S Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, United States
%@ 979-8-89176-390-6
%F han-etal-2026-exploring
%X Social bot accounts have long been disseminating disinformation and engaging in malicious activities on social media platforms. Detecting these social bots has become a critical and urgent task, essential for maintaining a healthy online ecosystem. Existing social bot detection research usually provides detection results directly without corresponding supportive explanations, making it difficult to assess the extent to which such predictions are trustworthy. This is a key concern for online moderation. In this work, we explore the detection interpretation and summarize a four-dimensional clue framework from individual and social perspectives. We propose CDRBot, which primarily employs outcome-reward reinforcement learning to train inspectors to generate faithful, grounded, and readable clues from the *User Information*, *Semantic Features*, *Interactive Situation*, and *Behavioral Pattern*. These clues are then integrated to make final predictions. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms other baselines in detection performance. The generated clues are faithful, grounded, and readable, and can significantly enhance the performance of large language models in social bot detection.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1338/
%P 28971-28992
Markdown (Informal)
[Exploring and Distilling Multi-Dimensional Clues for Interpretable Social Bot Detection](https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1338/) (Han et al., ACL 2026)
ACL
- Yi Han, Haiqi Lu, Lizi Liao, Shuhan Zhou, Yuanxing Liu, Weinan Zhang, and Ting Liu. 2026. Exploring and Distilling Multi-Dimensional Clues for Interpretable Social Bot Detection. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 28971–28992, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.