Support or Refute: Analyzing the Stance of Evidence to Detect Out-of-Context Mis- and Disinformation

Xin Yuan, Jie Guo, Weidong Qiu, Zheng Huang, Shujun Li


Abstract
Mis- and disinformation online have become a major societal problem as major sources of online harms of different kinds. One common form of mis- and disinformation is out-of-context (OOC) information, where different pieces of information are falsely associated, e.g., a real image combined with a false textual caption or a misleading textual description. Although some past studies have attempted to defend against OOC mis- and disinformation through external evidence, they tend to disregard the role of different pieces of evidence with different stances. Motivated by the intuition that the stance of evidence represents a bias towards different detection results, we propose a stance extraction network (SEN) that can extract the stances of different pieces of multi-modal evidence in a unified framework. Moreover, we introduce a support-refutation score calculated based on the co-occurrence relations of named entities into the textual SEN. Extensive experiments on a public large-scale dataset demonstrated that our proposed method outperformed the state-of-the-art baselines, with the best model achieving a performance gain of 3.2% in accuracy.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.259
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4268–4280
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.259
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.259
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xin Yuan, Jie Guo, Weidong Qiu, Zheng Huang, and Shujun Li. 2023. Support or Refute: Analyzing the Stance of Evidence to Detect Out-of-Context Mis- and Disinformation. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 4268–4280, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Support or Refute: Analyzing the Stance of Evidence to Detect Out-of-Context Mis- and Disinformation (Yuan et al., EMNLP 2023)
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