Credible or incredible? Dissecting urban legends

Abstract

Urban legends are a genre of modern folklore, consisting of stories about rare and exceptional events, just plausible enough to be believed. In our view, while urban legends represent a form of "sticky" deceptive text, they are marked by a tension between the credible and incredible. They should be credible like a news article and incredible like a fairy tale. In particular we will focus on the idea that urban legends should mimic the details of news (who, where, when) to be credible, while they should be emotional and readable like a fairy tale to be catchy and memorable. Using NLP tools we will provide a quantitative analysis of these prototypical characteristics. We also lay out some machine learning experiments showing that it is possible to recognize an urban legend using just these simple features. © 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.