Pragmatic Profiling for Disinformation Detection: An Exploratory Analysis of Stylistic Features in Spanish News

Alba Perez-Montero, María Miró Maestre, Elena Lloret, Paloma Moreda


Abstract
The spread of misleading and fabricated information has made automatic disinformation detection a central challenge for Natural Language Processing. While most approaches have focused on lexical, syntactic, or semantic cues, deceptive discourse is also shaped by pragmatic choices that reflect how information is framed, qualified, and directed toward readers. This paper investigates whether pragmatic information can improve disinformation detection in Spanish by explicitly incorporating two annotation layers: communicative intentions and subjectivity markers. We compare the impact of these pragmatic features across three modeling paradigms: traditional classifiers, an encoder-based transformer (RoBERTa), and generative language models (GPT-oss and Mistral-small). Our results show that pragmatic augmentation consistently improves over text-only baselines, with subjectivity markers displaying stronger discriminative power than intention labels. Statistical testing further confirms that the observed gains are robust for the generative models evaluated. These findings support the view that authorial stance and communicative purpose provide useful complementary evidence for veracity classification.
Anthology ID:
2026.nlpaics-1.3
Volume:
Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence for Cyber Security
Month:
June
Year:
2026
Address:
Alicante, Spain
Editors:
Ruslan Mitkov, Rafael Muñoz, Elena Lloret, Tharindu Ranasinghe, Ernesto L. Estevanell-Valladares, Salima Lamsiyah, Andrés Montoyo, Saad Ezzini
Venue:
NLPAICS
SIG:
Publisher:
Department of Languages and Information Systems, University of Alicante
Note:
Pages:
25–35
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.nlpaics-1.3/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Alba Perez-Montero, María Miró Maestre, Elena Lloret, and Paloma Moreda. 2026. Pragmatic Profiling for Disinformation Detection: An Exploratory Analysis of Stylistic Features in Spanish News. In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence for Cyber Security, pages 25–35, Alicante, Spain. Department of Languages and Information Systems, University of Alicante.
Cite (Informal):
Pragmatic Profiling for Disinformation Detection: An Exploratory Analysis of Stylistic Features in Spanish News (Perez-Montero et al., NLPAICS 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.nlpaics-1.3.pdf