Truth and deception at the rhetorical structure level
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper furthers the development of methods to distinguish truth from deception in textual data. We use rhetorical structure theory ( RST ) as the analytic framework to identify systematic differences between deceptive and truthful stories in terms of their coherence and structure. A sample of 36 elicited personal stories, self‐ranked as truthful or deceptive, is manually analyzed by assigning RST discourse relations among each story's constituent parts. A vector space model ( VSM ) assesses each story's position in multidimensional RST space with respect to its distance from truthful and deceptive centers as measures of the story's level of deception and truthfulness. Ten human judges evaluate independently whether each story is deceptive and assign their confidence levels (360 evaluations total), producing measures of the expected human ability to recognize deception. As a robustness check, a test sample of 18 truthful stories (with 180 additional evaluations) is used to determine the reliability of our RST‐VSM method in determining deception. The contribution is in demonstration of the discourse structure analysis as a significant method for automated deception detection and an effective complement to lexicosemantic analysis. The potential is in developing novel discourse‐based tools to alert information users to potential deception in computer‐mediated texts.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it