Character N-Grams for Detecting Deceptive Controversial Opinions

Abstract

[EN] Controversial topics are present in the everyday life, and opinions about them can be either truthful or deceptive. Deceptive opinions are emitted to mislead other people in order to gain some advantage. In the most of the cases humans cannot detect whether the opinion is deceptive or truthful, however, computational approaches have been used successfully for this purpose. In this work, we evaluate a representation based on character n-grams features for detecting deceptive opinions. We consider opinions on the following: abortion, death penalty and personal feelings about the best friend; three domains studied in the state of the art. We found character n-grams effective for detecting deception in these controversial domains, even more than using psycholinguistic features. Our results indicate that this representation is able to capture relevant information about style and content useful for this task. This fact allows us to conclude that the proposed one is a competitive text representation with a good trade-off between simplicity and performance.