Make Satire Boring Again: Reducing Stylistic Bias of Satirical Corpus by Utilizing Generative LLMs

Satire detection is essential for accurately extracting opinions from textual data and combating misinformation online. However, the lack of diverse corpora for satire leads to the problem of stylistic bias which impacts the models' detection performances. This study proposes a debiasing approach for satire detection, focusing on reducing biases in training data by utilizing generative large language models. The approach is evaluated in both cross-domain (irony detection) and cross-lingual (English) settings. Results show that the debiasing method enhances the robustness and generalizability of the models for satire and irony detection tasks in Turkish and English. However, its impact on causal language models, such as Llama-3.1, is limited. Additionally, this work curates and presents the Turkish Satirical News Dataset with detailed human annotations, with case studies on classification, debiasing, and explainability.

Multimodal Fact-Checking with Vision Language Models: A Probing Classifier based Solution with Embedding Strategies

This study evaluates the effectiveness of Vision Language Models (VLMs) in representing and utilizing multimodal content for fact-checking. To be more specific, we investigate whether incorporating multimodal content improves performance compared to text-only models and how well VLMs utilize text and image information to enhance misinformation detection. Furthermore we propose a probing classifier based solution using VLMs. Our approach extracts embeddings from the last hidden layer of selected VLMs and inputs them into a neural probing classifier for multi-class veracity classification. Through a series of experiments on two fact-checking datasets, we demonstrate that while multimodality can enhance performance, fusing separate embeddings from text and image encoders yielded superior results compared to using VLM embeddings. Furthermore, the proposed neural classifier significantly outperformed KNN and SVM baselines in leveraging extracted embeddings, highlighting its effectiveness for multimodal fact-checking.

Cross-Lingual Learning vs. Low-Resource Fine-Tuning: A Case Study with Fact-Checking in Turkish

The rapid spread of misinformation through social media platforms has raised concerns regarding its impact on public opinion. While misinformation is prevalent in other languages, the majority of research in this field has concentrated on the English language. Hence, there is a scarcity of datasets for other languages, including Turkish. To address this concern, we have introduced the FCTR dataset, consisting of 3238 real-world claims. This dataset spans multiple domains and incorporates evidence collected from three Turkish fact-checking organizations. Additionally, we aim to assess the effectiveness of cross-lingual transfer learning for low-resource languages, with a particular focus on Turkish. We demonstrate in-context learning (zero-shot and few-shot) performance of large language models in this context. The experimental results indicate that the dataset has the potential to advance research in the Turkish language.

Explaining Veracity Predictions with Evidence Summarization: A Multi-Task Model Approach

The rapid dissemination of misinformation through social media increased the importance of automated fact-checking. Furthermore, studies on what deep neural models pay attention to when making predictions have increased in recent years. While significant progress has been made in this field, it has not yet reached a level of reasoning comparable to human reasoning. To address these gaps, we propose a multi-task explainable neural model for misinformation detection. Specifically, this work formulates an explanation generation process of the model's veracity prediction as a text summarization problem. Additionally, the performance of the proposed model is discussed on publicly available datasets and the findings are evaluated with related studies.