Studying Dishonest Intentions in Brazilian Portuguese Texts

Abstract

Previous work in the social sciences, psychology and linguistics has show that liars have some control over the content of their stories, however their underlying state of mind may “leak out” through the way that they tell them. To the best of our knowledge, no previous systematic effort exists in order to describe and model deception language for Brazilian Portuguese. To fill this important gap, we carry out an initial empirical linguistic study on false statements in Brazilian news. We methodically analyze linguistic features using the Fake.Br corpus, which includes both fake and true news. The results show that they present substantial lexical, syntactic and semantic variations, as well as punctuation and emotion distinctions.