Modeling Discourse Profiles in Climate Misinformation Discourse

Ge Gao, Zhengyang Shan, Bryan A. Plummer, Margrit Betke, Derry Tanti Wijaya


Abstract
Prior work on climate misinformation detection typically classifies individual comments or claims using text alone. This framing overlooks a key property of online climate discourse: misinformation is often produced, reinforced, and sustained through recurring rhetorical patterns that reappear across comments and threads. Using a large-scale TikTok climate discourse dataset, we construct discourse profiles by clustering climate-related comments into recurring rhetorical patterns. We then incorporate these profiles into fine-grained climate misinformation classifiers using a late-fusion architecture. Under video-disjoint evaluation across three training seeds, discourse-profile-aware models significantly improve macro-F1 over text-only baselines for bag-of-words, TF-IDF, and MPNet representations. RoBERTa-large exhibits a positive mean improvement but substantially greater variability, and the difference is not statistically significant. Beyond classification, our results show discourse profiles shape misinformation reception and propagation. Discourse-profile-conditioned language model agents exhibit misinformation acceptance patterns aligned with profile-level misinformation prevalence in ClimateDisc, and the relationship between misinformation prevalence and engagement persistence differs across dominant discourse profiles.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-aacl.146
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: IJCNLP-AACL 2026
Month:
November
Year:
2026
Address:
Hengqin, China
Editors:
Yue Zhang, Ruifeng Xu, Ayu Purwarianti, Tong Rong, Jun Suzuki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2867–2887
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-aacl.146/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ge Gao, Zhengyang Shan, Bryan A. Plummer, Margrit Betke, and Derry Tanti Wijaya. 2026. Modeling Discourse Profiles in Climate Misinformation Discourse. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: IJCNLP-AACL 2026, pages 2867–2887, Hengqin, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Modeling Discourse Profiles in Climate Misinformation Discourse (Gao et al., Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-aacl.146.pdf