Satirical News Detection and Analysis using Attention Mechanism and Linguistic Features

Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1979–1989 Copenhagen, Denmark, September 7–11, 2017. c⃝2017 Association for Computational Linguistics Satirical News Detection and Analysis using Attention Mechanism and Linguistic Features Fan Yang and Arjun Mukherjee Department of Computer Science University of Houston {fyang11,arjun}@uh.edu Eduard Gragut Computer and Information Sciences Temple University edragut@temple.edu Abstract Satirical news is considered to be enter- tainment, but it is potentially deceptive and harmful. Despite the embedded genre in the article, not everyone can recognize the satirical cues and therefore believe the news as true news. We observe that satiri- cal cues are often reflected in certain para- graphs rather than the whole document. Existing works only consider document- level features to detect the satire, which could be limited. We consider paragraph- level linguistic features to unveil the satire by incorporating neural network and atten- tion mechanism. We investigate the differ- ence between paragraph-level features and document-level features, and analyze them on a large satirical news dataset. The eval- uation shows that the proposed model de- tects satirical news effectively and reveals what features are important at which level. 1 Introduction “When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.” — James Gleick Satirical news is considered to be entertainment. However, it is not easy to recognize the satire if the satirical cues are too subtle to be unmasked and the reader lacks the contextual or cultural background. The example illustrated in Table 1 is a piece of satirical news with subtle satirical cues. Assuming readers interpret satirical news as true news, there is not much difference between satirical news and fake news in terms of the con- sequence, which may hurt the credibility of the media and the trust in the society. In fact, it is reported in the Guardian that people may believe satirical news and spread them to the public re- ... “Kids these days are done with stories where things happen,” said CBC consultant and world's oldest child psychologist Obadiah Sugarman. “We'll finally be giv- ing them the stiff Victorian morality that I assume is in vogue. Not to mention, doing a period piece is a great way to make sure white people are adequately repre- sented on television.” ... Table 1: A paragraph of satirical news gardless of the ridiculous content1. It is also con- cluded that fake news is similar to satirical news via a thorough comparison among true news, fake news, and satirical news (Horne and Adali, 2017). This paper focuses on satirical news detection to ensure the trustworthiness of online news and pre- vent the spreading of potential misleading infor- mation. Some works tackling fake news and mislead- ing information favor to discover the truth (Xiao et al., 2016; Wan et al., 2016) through knowledge base (Dong et al., 2015) and truthfulness estima- tion (Ge et al., 2013). These approaches may not be feasible for satirical news because there is no ground-truth in the stories. Another track of works analyze social network activities (Zhao et …

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