Can Factual Statements Be Deceptive? The DeFaBel Corpus of Belief-based Deception

Aswathy Velutharambath, Amelie Wührl, Roman Klinger


Abstract
If a person firmly believes in a non-factual statement, such as “The Earth is flat”, and argues in its favor, there is no inherent intention to deceive. As the argumentation stems from genuine belief, it may be unlikely to exhibit the linguistic properties associated with deception or lying. This interplay of factuality, personal belief, and intent to deceive remains an understudied area. Disentangling the influence of these variables in argumentation is crucial to gain a better understanding of the linguistic properties attributed to each of them. To study the relation between deception and factuality, based on belief, we present the DeFaBel corpus, a crowd-sourced resource of belief-based deception. To create this corpus, we devise a study in which participants are instructed to write arguments supporting statements like “eating watermelon seeds can cause indigestion”, regardless of its factual accuracy or their personal beliefs about the statement. In addition to the generation task, we ask them to disclose their belief about the statement. The collected instances are labelled as deceptive if the arguments are in contradiction to the participants’ personal beliefs. Each instance in the corpus is thus annotated (or implicitly labelled) with personal beliefs of the author, factuality of the statement, and the intended deceptiveness. The DeFaBel corpus contains 1031 texts in German, out of which 643 are deceptive and 388 are non-deceptive. It is the first publicly available corpus for studying deception in German. In our analysis, we find that people are more confident in the persuasiveness of their arguments when the statement is aligned with their belief, but surprisingly less confident when they are generating arguments in favor of facts. The DeFaBel corpus can be obtained from https://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/data/defabel .
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.243
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
2708–2723
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.243
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Aswathy Velutharambath, Amelie Wührl, and Roman Klinger. 2024. Can Factual Statements Be Deceptive? The DeFaBel Corpus of Belief-based Deception. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 2708–2723, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Can Factual Statements Be Deceptive? The DeFaBel Corpus of Belief-based Deception (Velutharambath et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.243.pdf
Optional supplementary material:
 2024.lrec-main.243.OptionalSupplementaryMaterial.zip