Misinfo Reaction Frames: Reasoning about Readers' Reactions to News Headlines

Saadia Gabriel, Skyler Hallinan, Maarten Sap, Pemi Nguyen, Franziska Roesner, Eunsol Choi, Yejin Choi

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Even to a simple and short news headline, readers react in a multitude of ways: cognitively (e.g. inferring the writer's intent), emotionally (e.g. feeling distrust), and behaviorally (e.g. sharing the news with their friends). Such reactions are instantaneous and yet complex, as they rely on factors that go beyond interpreting factual content of news. We propose Misinfo Reaction Frames (MRF), a pragmatic formalism for modeling how readers might react to a news headline. In contrast to categorical schema, our free-text dimensions provide a more nuanced way of understanding intent beyond being benign or malicious. We also introduce a Misinfo Reaction Frames corpus, a crowdsourced dataset of reactions to over 25k news headlines focusing on global crises: the Covid-19 pandemic, climate change, and cancer. Empirical results confirm that it is indeed possible for neural models to predict the prominent patterns of readers' reactions to previously unseen news headlines. Additionally, our user study shows that displaying machine-generated MRF implications alongside news headlines to readers can increase their trust in real news while decreasing their trust in misinformation. Our work demonstrates the feasibility and importance of pragmatic inferences on news headlines to help enhance AI-guided misinformation detection and mitigation.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationACL 2022 - 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference (Long Papers)
EditorsSmaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages3108-3127
Number of pages20
ISBN (Electronic)9781955917216
StatePublished - 2022
Event60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2022 - Dublin, Ireland
Duration: May 22 2022May 27 2022

Publication series

NameProceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Volume1
ISSN (Print)0736-587X

Conference

Conference60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2022
Country/TerritoryIreland
CityDublin
Period5/22/225/27/22

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Science Applications
  • Linguistics and Language
  • Language and Linguistics

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Misinfo Reaction Frames: Reasoning about Readers' Reactions to News Headlines'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this