SoK: Machine Learning for Misinformation Detection

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Xiao, Madelyne, Mayer, Jonathan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Xiao, Madelyne
Mayer, Jonathan
author_facet Xiao, Madelyne
Mayer, Jonathan
contents We examine the disconnect between scholarship and practice in applying machine learning to trust and safety problems, using misinformation detection as a case study. We survey literature on automated detection of misinformation across a corpus of 248 well-cited papers in the field. We then examine subsets of papers for data and code availability, design missteps, reproducibility, and generalizability. Our paper corpus includes published work in security, natural language processing, and computational social science. Across these disparate disciplines, we identify common errors in dataset and method design. In general, detection tasks are often meaningfully distinct from the challenges that online services actually face. Datasets and model evaluation are often non-representative of real-world contexts, and evaluation frequently is not independent of model training. We demonstrate the limitations of current detection methods in a series of three representative replication studies. Based on the results of these analyses and our literature survey, we conclude that the current state-of-the-art in fully-automated misinformation detection has limited efficacy in detecting human-generated misinformation. We offer recommendations for evaluating applications of machine learning to trust and safety problems and recommend future directions for research.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2308_12215
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SoK: Machine Learning for Misinformation Detection
Xiao, Madelyne
Mayer, Jonathan
Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
We examine the disconnect between scholarship and practice in applying machine learning to trust and safety problems, using misinformation detection as a case study. We survey literature on automated detection of misinformation across a corpus of 248 well-cited papers in the field. We then examine subsets of papers for data and code availability, design missteps, reproducibility, and generalizability. Our paper corpus includes published work in security, natural language processing, and computational social science. Across these disparate disciplines, we identify common errors in dataset and method design. In general, detection tasks are often meaningfully distinct from the challenges that online services actually face. Datasets and model evaluation are often non-representative of real-world contexts, and evaluation frequently is not independent of model training. We demonstrate the limitations of current detection methods in a series of three representative replication studies. Based on the results of these analyses and our literature survey, we conclude that the current state-of-the-art in fully-automated misinformation detection has limited efficacy in detecting human-generated misinformation. We offer recommendations for evaluating applications of machine learning to trust and safety problems and recommend future directions for research.
title SoK: Machine Learning for Misinformation Detection
topic Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.12215