Identification of Truth and Deception in Text: Application of Vector Space Model to Rhetorical Structure Theory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The paper proposes to use Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) 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 completely truthful or completely deceptive, is manually analyzed by assigning RST discourse relations among a story’s constituent parts. Vector Space Model (VSM) assesses each story’s position in multi-dimensional RST space with respect to its distance to truth and deceptive centers as measures of the story’s level of deception and truthfulness. Ten human judges evaluate if each story is deceptive or not, and assign their confidence levels, which produce measures of the human expected deception and truthfulness levels. The paper contributes to deception detection research and RST twofold: a) demonstration of discourse structure analysis in pragmatics as a prominent way of automated deception detection and, as such, an effective complement to lexico-semantic analysis, and b) development of RST-VSM methodology to interpret RST analysis in identification of previously unseen deceptive texts.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".