Mining for lies

Driven by advancements in Web-based infom1ation technologies and increasing globalization, computer-

mediated communication continues to f i l t e r into everyday life, bringing with it new venues for deception. The
volume of text-based chat, instant messaging, text messaging, and text generated by online communities of
practice is increasing r a p i d l y . Even e-mail continues to grow in use. With the massive growth of text-based
c o m m u n i c a t i o n , the potential for people to deceive others through computer-mediated communication has
also grown, and such deception can have disastrous results.

Unfortunately, in general, humans tend to perfom1 poorly at deception-detection tasks. This phenomenon is
exacerbated in text-based communications. A large part of the research on deception detection (also known as
credibility assessment) has involved face-to-face meetings and interviews. Yet, with the growth of text-based
communication, text-based deception-detection techniques are essential.

Techniques for successfully detecting deception- that is, lies-have wide applicability. Law enforcement can use
decision support tools and techniques to investigate crimes, conduct security screening in airports, and monitor
communications of suspected terrorists. Human resources professionals might use deception detection tools to screen
applicants. These tools and techniques also have the potential to screen e-mails to uncover fraud or other wrongdoings
committed by corporate officers. Although some people believe that they can readily identify those who are not being
truthful, a summary of deception research showed that, on average, people are only percent accurate in making
veracity d e t e r mi n a t i o n s (Bond and DePaulo, 2006). 'This figure may actually be worse when humans try to detect
deception in text.

Using a combination of text mining and data mining techniques, Fuller et al. (2008) analyzed person-of-
interest statements completed by people involved in crimes on military bases. In these statements, suspects
and w i t n e s s e s are required to write their recollection of the event in their own words. Military law
enforcement personnel searched archival data for statements that they could conclusively identify as being
truthful or deceptive. n1ese decisions were made on the basis of corroborating evidence and case resolution.
Once labeled as truthful or deceptive, the law enforcement personnel removed identifying information and gave
the statements to the research team. In total, 371 usable statements were received for analysis. The text- based
deception detection method u s e d by Fuller et al. (2008) was based on a process known as message feature
mining, which relies on elements of data and text mining techniques. A sin1plified depiction of the process is
provided in Figure 3.

First, the researchers prepared the data for processing. The original handwritten statements had to be
transcribed into a word processing file. Second, features (i.e., cues) were identified. The researchers
identified 31 features representing categories or types of language that are relatively independent of the text
content and that can be readily a n a l y z e d by automated means. For example, first-person pronouns such as
I or me can be identified without analysis of the surrounding text. Table 1 lists the categories and an
example list of features used in this study.

The features were extracted from the textual statements and input into a flat file for further processing. Using
several feature-selection methods along with 10-fold cross-validation, the researchers compared the prediction
accuracy of three p o p u l a r data mining methods. Their results indicated that neural network models performed
the best, with 73.46 percent prediction accuracy on test data samples; decision trees performed second b e s t ,
with 71.60 percent accuracy; and logistic regression was last, with 65.28 percent a c c u r a c y .

The results indicate that automated text-based deception detection has the potential to aid t h o s e who must try
to detect lies in text and can be successfully applied to real-world data. The accuracy of these techniques
exceeded the accuracy of most other deception-detection t e c h n i q u e s e v e n though it was limited to textual
cues.
 Statements
transcribed for
processing

Statements labeled as
Cues extracted
truthful or deceptive by
and selected
law enforcement

Classification models Text processing software

trained and tested on identified cues in
quantified cues statements

Text processing software

generated quantified cues

FIGURE 3 Text-Based Deception-Detection Process. Source: C. M. Fuller, D. Biros, and D. Delen, "Exploration of
Feature Selection and Advanced Classification Models for High-Stakes Deception Detection," in Proceedings of the
41st Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), January 2008, Big Island, HI, IEEE Press, pp.
80-99.

TABLE 1 Categories and Examples of Linguistic Features Used in Deception Detection

Number Construct (Category) Example Cues

1 Quantity
2 Complexity
3 Uncertainty
4 Nonimmediacy
5 Expressivity
6 Diversity
7 Informality
8 Specificity
9 Affect
Verb count, noun-phrase count, etc.
Average number of clauses, average sentence length, etc.
Modifiers, modal verbs, etc.
Passive voice, objectification, etc.
Emotiveness
Lexical diversity, redundancy, etc.
Typographical error ratio
Spatiotemporal information, perceptual information, etc.
Positive affect, negative affect, etc.