Deceptive text poses a significant threat to users, resulting in widespread misinformation and disorder. While researchers have created numerous cutting-edge techniques for detecting deception in domain-specific settings, whether there is a generic deception pattern so that deception-related knowledge in one domain can be transferred to the other remains mostly unexplored. Moreover, the disparities in textual expression across these many mediums pose an additional obstacle for generalization. To this end, we present a Multi-Task Learning (MTL)-based deception generalization strategy to reduce the domain-specific noise and facilitate a better understanding of deception via a generalized training. As deceptive domains, we use News (fake news), Tweets (rumors), and Reviews (fake reviews) and employ LSTM and BERT model to incorporate domain transfer techniques. Our proposed architecture for the combined approach of domain-independent and domain-specific training improves the deception detection performance by up to 5.28% in F1-score.

The deception in the text can be of different forms in different domains, including fake news, rumor tweets, and spam emails. Irrespective of the domain, the main intent of the deceptive text is to deceit the reader. Although domain-specific deception detection exists, domain-independent deception detection can provide a holistic picture, which can be crucial to understand how deception occurs in the text. In this paper, we detect deception in a domain-independent setting using deep learning architectures. Our method outperforms the State-of-the-Art performance of most benchmark datasets with an overall accuracy of 93.42% and F1-Score of 93.22%. The domain-independent training allows us to capture subtler nuances of deceptive writing style. Furthermore, we analyze how much in-domain data may be helpful to accurately detect deception, especially for the cases where data may not be readily available to train. Our results and analysis indicate that there may be a universal pattern of deception lying in-between the text independent of the domain, which can create a novel area of research and open up new avenues in the field of deception detection.

Opinion prediction is an emerging research area with diverse real-world applications, such as market research and situational awareness. We identify two lines of approaches to the problem of opinion prediction. One uses topic-based sentiment analysis with time-series modeling, while the other uses static embedding of text. The latter approaches seek user-specific solutions by generating user fingerprints. Such approaches are useful in predicting user’s reactions to unseen content. In this work, we propose a novel dynamic fingerprinting method that leverages contextual embedding of user’s comments conditioned on relevant user’s reading history. We integrate BERT variants with a recurrent neural network to generate predictions. The results show up to 13% improvement in micro F1-score compared to previous approaches. Experimental results show novel insights that were previously unknown such as better predictions for an increase in dynamic history length, the impact of the nature of the article on performance, thereby laying the foundation for further research.