Integrating Argumentation and Hate-Speech-based Techniques for Countering Misinformation

Sougata Saha, Rohini Srihari


Abstract
The proliferation of online misinformation presents a significant challenge, requiring scalable strategies for effective mitigation. While detection methods exist, current reactive approaches, like content flagging and banning, are short-term and insufficient. Additionally, advancements like large language models (LLMs) exacerbate the issue by enabling large-scale creation and dissemination of misinformation. Thus, sustainable, scalable solutions that encourage behavior change and broaden perspectives by persuading misinformants against their viewpoints or broadening their perspectives are needed. To this end, we propose persuasive LLM-based dialogue systems to tackle misinformation. However, challenges arise due to the lack of suitable datasets and formal frameworks for generating persuasive responses. Inspired by existing methods for countering online hate speech, we explore adapting counter-hate response strategies for misinformation. Since misinformation and hate speech often coexist despite differing intentions, we develop classifiers to identify and annotate response strategies from hate-speech counter-responses for use in misinformation scenarios. Human evaluations show a 91% agreement on the applicability of these strategies to misinformation. Next, as a scalable counter-misinformation solution, we create an LLM-based argument graph framework that generates persuasive responses, using the strategies as control codes to adjust the style and content. Human evaluations and case studies demonstrate that our framework generates expert-like responses and is 14% more engaging, 21% more natural, and 18% more factual than the best available alternatives.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.622
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11109–11124
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/2024.emnlp-main.622/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.622
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sougata Saha and Rohini Srihari. 2024. Integrating Argumentation and Hate-Speech-based Techniques for Countering Misinformation. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 11109–11124, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Integrating Argumentation and Hate-Speech-based Techniques for Countering Misinformation (Saha & Srihari, EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/2024.emnlp-main.622.pdf