Digital Commons Network^™

Native Advertising: Ads In Disguise As Editorials, Sarah Cornwell, Victoria L. Rubin

Victoria Rubin

Native advertising, paid for by corporate funding, may fool news readers into thinking that they are reading investigative journalism editorials. Such misleading practice constitutes an internal threat to the profession of journalism and may further deteriorate mainstream media trust. If information users are unaware of the Native Ads original promotional nature, they may find themselves insufficiently informed or mislead by its content. This study investigates cases of Native Ads in terms of their contextual use, distinctive features, and likeness to editorials. LIS should aim to provide clear discernment guidelines and consider automated user alerts.

News Verification Suite: Towards System Design To Supplement Reporters’ And Editors’ Judgements, Victoria L. Rubin

Victoria Rubin

The News Verification Suite aims to provide users with a set of functions to verify information in the news. This paper offers a conceptual basis and a vision of system elements towards automated fact-checking in news production, curation, and consumption. The traditional model of journalism is compared to ‘news sharing a.s.a.p.’, highlighting similarities between journalistic criteria of excellence and LIS mandates for credibility and information quality. Potential steps for intervention with text-analytical technologies are identified – deception detection, rumor busting, satire labeling; they are nascent but feasible. Automated news verification can support and supplement news producers’ and news readers’ decision-making.

Pragmatic And Cultural Considerations For Deception Detection In Asian Languages, Victoria L. Rubin

Victoria Rubin

In hopes of sparking a discussion, I argue for much needed research on automated deception detection in Asian languages. The task of discerning truthful texts from deceptive ones is challenging, but a logical sequel to opinion mining. I suggest that applied computational linguists pursue broader interdisciplinary research on cultural differences and pragmatic use of language in Asian cultures, before turning to detection methods based on a primarily Western (English-centric) worldview. Deception is fundamentally human, but how do various cultures interpret and judge deceptive behavior?

Comparative Stylistic Fanfiction Analysis: Popular And Unpopular Fics Across Eleven Fandoms, Victoria L. Rubin, Vanessa Girouard

Victoria Rubin

Abstract: This study analyses 545 sample fanfiction stories (fics) in their stylistic feature variation by popularity and across eleven ‘fandoms’ in creative writing forums. Lexical richness, average sentence and paragraph lengths are isolated as promising measures for a text classifier to use in predicting a fic’s likely popularity in its fandom. Résumé: Cette étude analyse un échantillon de 545 chapitres d‘œuvres de fanfiction (fics) selon leur variation stylistique et leur popularité dans onze ‘fandoms’ différents. La richesse lexicale, longueur moyenne de phrase et longueur moyenne de paragraphe ont été choisis comme traits stylistiques propres à différencier les fics populaires des …

Veracity Roadmap: Is Big Data Objective, Truthful And Credible?, Tatiana Lukoianova, Victoria L. Rubin

Victoria Rubin

This paper argues that big data can possess different characteristics, which affect its quality. Depending on its origin, data processing technologies, and methodologies used for data collection and scientific discoveries, big data can have biases, ambiguities, and inaccuracies which need to be identified and accounted for to reduce inference errors and improve the accuracy of generated insights. Big data veracity is now being recognized as a necessary property for its utilization, complementing the three previously established quality dimensions (volume, variety, and velocity), But there has been little discussion of the concept of veracity thus far. This paper provides a roadmap …

Truth And Deception At The Rhetorical Structure Level, Victoria L. Rubin, Tatiana Lukoianova

Victoria Rubin

This paper furthers the development of methods to dis- tinguish truth from deception in textual data. We use rhetorical structure theory (RST) as the analytic framework to identify systematic differences between deceptive and truthful stories in terms of their coher- ence and structure. A sample of 36 elicited personal stories, self-ranked as truthful or deceptive, is manu- ally analyzed by assigning RST discourse relations among each story’s constituent parts. A vector space model (VSM) assesses each story’s position in multi- dimensional RST space with respect to its distance from truthful and deceptive centers as measures of the story’s level of …

Differences Over Discourse Structure Differences: A Reply To Urquhart And Urquhart, Jennie A. Abrahamson, Victoria L. Rubin

Victoria Rubin

Purpose – In this paper we respond to Urquhart and Urquhart’s critique of our previous work entitled “Discourse structure differences in lay and professional health communication”, published in this journal in 2012 (Vol. 68 No. 6, pp.826 – 851, doi: 10.1108/00220411211277064).

Design/methodology/approach – We examine Urquhart and Urquhart’s critique and provide responses to their concerns and cautionary remarks against cross-disciplinary contributions. We reiterate our central claim.

Findings – We argue that Mann and Thompson’s (1987, 1988) Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) offers valuable insights into computer-mediated health communication and deserves further discussion of its methodological strength and weaknesses for application in …

Deception Detection And Rumor Debunking For Social Media, Victoria L. Rubin

Victoria Rubin

Abstract

The main premise of this chapter is that the time is ripe for more extensive research and development of social media tools that filter out intentionally deceptive information such as deceptive memes, rumors and hoaxes, fake news or other fake posts, tweets and fraudulent profiles. Social media users’ awareness of intentional manipulation of online content appears to be relatively low, while the reliance on unverified information (often obtained from strangers) is at an all-time high. I argue there is need for content verification, systematic fact-checking and filtering of social media streams. This literature survey provides a background for understanding …

Discerning Truth From Deception: Human Judgments And Automation Efforts, Victoria L. Rubin, Niall Conroy

Victoria Rubin

Recent improvements in effectiveness and accuracy of the emerging field of automated deception detection and the associated potential of language technologies have triggered increased interest in mass media and general public. Computational tools capable of alerting users to potentially deceptive content in computer–mediated messages are invaluable for supporting undisrupted, computer–mediated communication and information practices, credibility assessment and decision–making. The goal of this ongoing research is to inform creation of such automated capabilities. In this study we elicit a sample of 90 computer–mediated personal stories with varying levels of deception. Each story has 10 associated human deception level judgments, confidence scores, …