BetXplain: An Explanation-Annotated Dataset for Detecting Manipulative Betting Advertisements on Social Media

Msvpj Sathvik, Parmitha Vangapandu, Nishit Rahul Rane, Sathwik Narkedimilli, Mark Lee, Akrati Saxena


Abstract
The promotion of betting applications on social media platforms has increased significantly in recent years. Many of these advertisements use persuasive techniques that may mislead users, encourage risky behavior, and potentially influence users’ mental well-being. However, research on the automated detection of manipulative and deceptive betting advertisements remains limited due to the lack of publicly available annotated datasets. In this work, we introduce a new dataset of betting-related advertisements collected from two widely used social media platforms, Instagram and Reddit. The advertisements were manually annotated for manipulative and deceptive advertising practices. In addition to classification labels, the dataset includes human-provided explanations that describe the reasoning behind each annotation, enabling research into explainable approaches to detecting manipulative advertising. Furthermore, we analyze the strategies commonly used in betting advertisements and examine how these persuasive tactics may impact users’ mental health. The proposed framework can also enable practical applications such as browser plugins that warn users about manipulative betting advertisements and automated web crawlers that help regulatory authorities monitor and detect such promotions online.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-aacl.205
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:
4073–4089
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-aacl.205/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Msvpj Sathvik, Parmitha Vangapandu, Nishit Rahul Rane, Sathwik Narkedimilli, Mark Lee, and Akrati Saxena. 2026. BetXplain: An Explanation-Annotated Dataset for Detecting Manipulative Betting Advertisements on Social Media. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: IJCNLP-AACL 2026, pages 4073–4089, Hengqin, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
BetXplain: An Explanation-Annotated Dataset for Detecting Manipulative Betting Advertisements on Social Media (Sathvik et al., Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-aacl.205.pdf