Abstract
How do human beings tell the difference between truths and lies, and avoid being deceived? And is it possible for a machine to determine the veracity of any given statement or set of statements prior to incorporating such statements in a knowledge base, or to determine whether the deception even exists at the statement level? This paper reviews past research in deception and its detection to explore such questions. We focus in on various inconsistencies, contradictions, and other difficulties in recent deception research, and show how the nature of the deception largely dictates the methods that can be deployed effectively in detection by reference to several experiments on materials which can have a strongly deceptive framing.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Robin Sage (2013).
Vijayan (2010).
Section 2 is adapted from our publication in the 13th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics specialised workshop on Computational Approaches to Deception Detection (Vartapetiance and Gillam 2012a). The EACL copyright agreement allows for publication of this material in other outlets.
MuchMore Springer Bilingual Corpus, Available at: http://muchmore.dfki.de/resources1.htm.
Dossier D (2013).
Spinning the Election (Skillicorn and Little) http://research.cs.queensu.ca/home/skill/election/election.html.
References
BBC (2009) ‘Visions Link’ to coffee intake. BBC News. Retrieved 10.07.2013 from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7827761.stm
Buller DB, Burgoon JK (1996) Interpersonal deception theory. Commun Theory 6:203–242
Burgoon JK, Qin T (2006) The dynamic nature of deceptive verbal communication. J Lang Soc Psychol 25(1):76–96
Burgoon JK, Blair JP, Qin T, Nunamaker JF Jr (2003) Detecting deception through linguistic analysis. In: Proceedings of first NSF/NIJ symposium on intelligence and security informatics (ISI), Tucson, pp 91–101
Camden C, Motley MM, Wilson A (1984) White lies in interpersonal communication: a taxonomy and preliminary investigation of social motivations. West J Speech Commun 48:309–325
Church K, Hanks P (1991) Word association norms, mutual information and lexicography. J Comput Linguist 16(1):22–29
Clough P, Stevenson M (2010) Developing a corpus of plagiarised short answers. J Lang Resour Eval 45(1):5–24
Cody MJ, Marston PJ, Foster M (1984) Deception: paralinguistic and verbal leakage. In: Bostrom RN, Westley BH (eds) Communication Yearbook 8. Sage, Beverly Hills, pp 464–490
DePaulo BM, Kashy DA, Kirkendol SE, Wyer MM, Epstein JA (1996) Lying in everyday life. J Pers Soc Psychol 70:979–995
DePaulo BM, Lindsay JJ, Malone BE, Muhlenbruck L, Charlton K, Cooper H (2003) Cues to deception. Psychol Bull 129(1):74–118
Dossier D (2013). Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopaedia. Wikimedia Foundation Inc. Encyclopaedia on-line. Retrieved 10/07/2013 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Dossier
Doyen S, Klein O, Pichon CL, Cleeremans A (2012) Behavioral priming: it’s all in the mind, but whose mind? PLoS One 7(1): e29081. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0029081
Eissen SM zu, Stein B (2006) Intrinsic plagiarism detection. In: Advances in information retrieval, Lecture notes in computer science, vol 3936, pp 565–569
Ekman P (1985) Telling lies, clues to deceit in the marketplace, politics, and marriage. W.W. Norton & Company, New York
Erat S, Gneezy U (2009) White Lies, Rady Working paper, Rady School of Management, University of California, San Diego
Pennebaker JW, Francis, ME, Booth RJ (2001) Linguistic inquiry and word count (LIWC). Erlbaum Publishers
Franke RC, Kaul JD (1978) The Hawthorne experiments: first statistical interpretation. Am Sociol Rev 43(5):623–643
Gipp B, Meuschke N, Beel J (2011) Comparative evaluation of text-and citation-based plagiarism detection approaches using GuttenPlag. In: Proceedings of 11th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on digital libraries (JCDL’11), pp 225–258
Gray WS, Leary BE (1935) What Makes a Book Readable. Chicago University Press, Chicago
Gupta S, Skillicorn D (2006) Improving a textual deception detection model. In: Proceedings of the 2006 conference of the center for advanced studies on collaborative research, Toronto, pp 1–4
Gupta S, Skillicorn D (2006) Improving a textual deception detection model. In: Proceedings of the 2006 conference of the center for advanced studies on collaborative research, Canada, pp 1–4
Hall HV, Pritchard DA (1996) Detecting Malingering and Deception. Forensic Distortion Analysis (FDA). St. Lucie Press, Boca Raton
Hample D (1980) Purposes and effects of lying. South Speech Commun J 46:33–47
Hancock JT, Curry L, Goorha S, Woodworth MT (2004) Lies in conversation: an examination of deception using automated linguistic analysis. In: Proceedings of annual conference of the cognitive science society, 26, pp 534–540
Hancock JT, Thom-Santelli J, Ritchie T (2004) Deception and design: the impact of communication technology on lying behaviour. In: Proceedings of the conference on human factors in computing systems (ACM SIGCHI), pp 129–134
Hancock JT, Curry L, Goorha S, Woodworth MT (2005) Automated linguistic analysis of deceptive and truthful synchronous computer-mediated communication. In: Proceedings of the 38th annual Hawaii international conference on system sciences (HICSS-38), IEEE Press, Los Alamitos
Hancock JT, Birnholtz J, Bazarova N, Guillory J, Amos B, Perlin J (2009) Butler lies: awareness, deception and design. In: Proceedings of the ACM conference on human factors in computing systems (CHI 09), Boston, pp 517–526
Inches G, Crestani F (2012) Overview of the international sexual predator identification competition at PAN-2012. In: Proceedings of the 6th PAN workshop at CLEF2012 on uncovering plagiarism, authorship, and social software misuse (PAN2012), Rome
Jones SR (1992) Was there a Hawthorne effect? Am J Sociol 98(3):451–468
Keila PS, Skillicorn DB (2005a) Detecting unusual and deceptive communication in email. In: Proceedings of the 2005 conference of the centre for advanced studies on collaborative research, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, IBM Press
Keila PS, Skillicorn DB (2005b) Structure in the Enron email dataset. Comput Math Organ Theory 11(3):183–199
Keila PS, Skillicorn DB (2005b) Detecting unusual email communication. In: Proceedings of the 2005 conference of the centre for advanced studies on collaborative research, pp 117–125
Knapp ML, Hart RP, Dennis HS (1974) An exploration of deception as a communication construct. Human Commun Res 1:15–29
Left S (2002) Casting the Net for Paedophiles. Guardian Unlimited. Retrieved 10.07.2013 from http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2002/apr/24/internetnews.childprotection1
Lindskold S, Walters PS (1983) Categories for acceptability of lies. J Soc Psychol 120:129–136
Little A, Skillicorn B (2008) Detecting deception in testimony. In: Proceeding of IEEE international conference of intelligence and security informatics (ISI 2008), Taipei, pp 13–18
Mahon JE (2007) A definition of deceiving. Int J Appl Philos 21:181–194
Mahon JE (2008) Two definitions of lying. Int J Appl Philos 22(2):211–230
Masip J, Garrido E, Herrero C (2004) Defining deception. Anales de Psicologia 20(1):147–171
Maurer H, Kappe F, Zaka B (2006) Plagiarism: a survey. J Univ Comput Sci 12(8):1050–1084
Miller GR, Stiff JB (1993) Deceptive communication. Sage, Newbury Park
Mosteller F, Wallace DL (1964) Inference and disputed authorship: the federalist. Addison Wesley
Newbold N, Gillam L (2010) The linguistics of readability: the next step for word. In: Processing. Workshop on computational linguistics and writing: writing processes and authoring aids (CLandW 2010), Los Angles, pp 65–72
Newman ML, Pennebaker JW, Berry DS, Richards JM (2003) Lying words: predicting deception from linguistic styles. Pers Soc Psychol Bull 29(5):665–675
PAN (2012) In: 6th PAN workshop at CLEF2012 on uncovering plagiarism, authorship, and social software misuse (PAN2012), Rome
PAN (2013) In: 7th PAN workshop at CLEF2013 on uncovering plagiarism, authorship, and social software misuse (PAN2013), Valencia
Pennebaker JW, Mehl M, Niederhoffer K (2003) Psychological aspects of natural language use: our words, our selves. Annu Rev Psychol 54(1):547–577
Qin T, Burgoon JK, Nunamaker JF Jr (2004) An exploratory study on promising cues in deception detection and application of decision trees. In: Proceedings of the 37th Hawaii international conference on system sciences, Waikoloa, pp 23–32
Qin T, Burgoon JK, Blair JP, Nunamaker JF (2005) Modality effects in deception detection and applications in automatic-deception-detection. In: Proceedings of the 38th annual Hawaii international conference on system sciences, pp 1–10
Robin Sage (2013). Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopaedia. Wikimedia Foundation Inc. Encyclopaedia on-line. Retrieved 10/07/2013 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Sage
Russow LM (1986) Deception: a philosophical perspective. In: Mitchell RW, Thompson NS (eds) Deception: perspective on human and nonhuman deceit. State University of New York Press, Albany, pp 41–52
Seaward L, Matwin S (2009) Intrinsic plagiarism detection using complexity analysis. In: Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on uncovering plagiarism, authorship, and social software misuse (PAN09), pp 56–61
Stamatatos E (2009) Intrinsic plagiarism detection using character n-gram profiles. In: Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on uncovering plagiarism, authorship, and social software misuse (PAN09), pp 38–46
Stein B, Koppel M, Stamatatos E (2007) Plagiarism analysis, authorship identification, and near-duplicate detection PAN’07. ACM SIGIR Forum pp 68–71
Stein B, Lipka N, Prettenhofer P (2010) Intrinsic plagiarism analysis. Lang Resour Eval 45(1):63–82
Toma CL, Hancock JT (2010) Reading between the lines: linguistic cues to deception in online dating profiles. In: Proceedings of the 2010 ACM conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2010), Savannah, pp 5–8
Vartapetiance A, Gillam L (2012) I don’t know where he’s not’: does deception research yet offer a basis for deception detectives? In: Proceeding of EACL 2012 workshop on computational approaches to deception detection, Avignon, pp 5–15
Vartapetiance A, Gillam L (2012) Quite simple approaches for authorship attribution, intrinsic plagiarism detection and sexual predator identification. In: Proceedings of the 6th PAN workshop at CLEF2012 on uncovering plagiarism, authorship, and social software misuse (PAN2012), Rome
Vijayan J (2010) Fake femme fatale shows social network risks. Computerworld Magazine. Retrieved 10.07.2013 from http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9179507/Fake_i_femme_fatale_i_shows_social_network_risks
Vrij A (2000) Detecting lies and deceit: the psychology of lying and its implications for professional practice. Wiley, Chichester
Vrij A, Mann S (2004) Detecting deception: the benefit of looking at a combination of behavioral, auditory and speech content related cues in a systematic manner. Group Decision and Negotiation (special deception issue) 13:61–79
Vrij A, Edward K, Bull R (2001) Stereotypical verbal and nonverbal responses while deceiving others. Pers Soc Psychol Bull 27:899–909
Walker D (2004) I’m a celebrity, get me a ghost writer. BBC News. Retrieved 10.07.2013 from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3757275.stm
Zhou L, Burgoon JK, Twitchell DP (2003) A longitudinal analysis of language behavior of deception in E-mail. In: Proceedings of Intelligence and Security Informatics, 2665, pp 102–110
Zhou L, Twitchell DP, Tiantian Q, Burgoon JK, Nunamaker JF Jr (2003) An exploratory study into deception detection in text-based computer-mediated communication. In: Proceedings of the 36th annual Hawaii international conference on system sciences, Waikoloa, pp 10–19
Zhou L, Burgoon JK, Zhang D, Nunamaker JF Jr (2004) Language dominance in interpersonal deception in computer-mediated communication. Comput Hum Behav 20(3):381–402
Zuckerman M, DePaulo BM, Rosenthal R (1981) Verbal and nonverbal communication of deception. In: Berkowitz L (ed) Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 14:1–59
Acknowledgments
The authors gratefully acknowledge prior from EPSRC/JISC (EP/I034408/1), the UK’s Technology Strategy Board (TSB, 169201), and also the efforts of the PAN13 organizers in crafting and managing the tasks.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
This article is part of the Topical Collection on Uncovering Deception in Social Media.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Vartapetiance, A., Gillam, L. Deception detection: dependable or defective?. Soc. Netw. Anal. Min. 4, 166 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-014-0166-8
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-014-0166-8