This study explores the generation and evaluation of synthetic fake news through fact based manipulations using large language models (LLMs). We introduce a novel methodology that extracts key facts from real articles, modifies them, and regenerates content to simulate fake news while maintaining coherence. To assess the quality of the generated content, we propose a set of evaluation metrics coherence, dissimilarity, and correctness. The research also investigates the application of synthetic data in fake news classification, comparing traditional machine learning models with transformer based models such as BERT. Our experiments demonstrate that transformer models, especially BERT, effectively leverage synthetic data for fake news detection, showing improvements with smaller proportions of synthetic data. Additionally, we find that fact verification features, which focus on identifying factual inconsistencies, provide the most promising results in distinguishing synthetic fake news. The study highlights the potential of synthetic data to enhance fake news detection systems, offering valuable insights for future research and suggesting that targeted improvements in synthetic data generation can further strengthen detection models.
The rise of various social platforms has transformed journalism. The growing demand for news content has led to the increased use of large language models (LLMs) in news production due to their speed and cost-effectiveness. However, LLMs still encounter limitations in professionalism and ethical judgment in news generation. Additionally, predicting public feedback is usually difficult before news is released. To tackle these challenges, we introduce AI-Press, an automated news drafting and polishing system based on multi-agent collaboration and Retrieval-Augmented Generation. We develop a feedback simulation system that generates public feedback considering demographic distributions. Through extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations, our system shows significant improvements in news-generating capabilities and verifies the effectiveness of public feedback simulation.
Explainable fake news detection predicts the authenticity of news items with annotated explanations. Today, Large Language Models (LLMs) are known for their powerful natural language understanding and explanation generation abilities. However, presenting LLMs for explainable fake news detection remains two main challenges. Firstly, fake news appears reasonable and could easily mislead LLMs, leaving them unable to understand the complex news-faking process. Secondly, utilizing LLMs for this task would generate both correct and incorrect explanations, which necessitates abundant labor in the loop. In this paper, we propose LLM-GAN, a novel framework that utilizes prompting mechanisms to enable an LLM to become Generator and Detector and for realistic fake news generation and detection. Our results demonstrate LLM-GAN's effectiveness in both prediction performance and explanation quality. We further showcase the integration of LLM-GAN to a cloud-native AI platform to provide better fake news detection service in the cloud.
In the era dominated by information overload and its facilitation with Large Language Models (LLMs), the prevalence of misinformation poses a significant threat to public discourse and societal well-being. A critical concern at present involves the identification of machine-generated news. In this work, we take a significant step by introducing a benchmark dataset designed for neural news detection in four languages: English, Turkish, Hungarian, and Persian. The dataset incorporates outputs from multiple multilingual generators (in both, zero-shot and fine-tuned setups) such as BloomZ, LLaMa-2, Mistral, Mixtral, and GPT-4. Next, we experiment with a variety of classifiers, ranging from those based on linguistic features to advanced Transformer-based models and LLMs prompting. We present the detection results aiming to delve into the interpretablity and robustness of machine-generated texts detectors across all target languages.
We present an automatic text expansion system to generate English sentences, which performs automatic Natural Language Generation (NLG) by combining linguistic rules with statistical approaches. Here, "automatic" means that the system can generate coherent and correct sentences from a minimum set of words. From its inception, the design is modular and adaptable to other languages. This adaptability is one of its greatest advantages. For English, we have created the highly precise aLexiE lexicon with wide coverage, which represents a contribution on its own. We have evaluated the resulting NLG library in an Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) proof of concept, both directly (by regenerating corpus sentences) and manually (from annotations) using a popular corpus in the NLG field. We performed a second analysis by comparing the quality of text expansion in English to Spanish, using an ad-hoc Spanish-English parallel corpus. The system might also be applied to other domains such as report and news generation.
The remarkable capabilities and easy accessibility of large language models (LLMs) have significantly increased societal risks (e.g., fake news generation), necessitating the development of LLM-generated text (LGT) detection methods for safe usage. However, detecting LGTs is challenging due to the vast number of LLMs, making it impractical to account for each LLM individually; hence, it is crucial to identify the common characteristics shared by these models. In this paper, we draw attention to a common feature of recent powerful LLMs, namely the alignment training, i.e., training LLMs to generate human-preferable texts. Our key finding is that as these aligned LLMs are trained to maximize the human preferences, they generate texts with higher estimated preferences even than human-written texts; thus, such texts are easily detected by using the reward model (i.e., an LLM trained to model human preference distribution). Based on this finding, we propose two training schemes to further improve the detection ability of the reward model, namely (i) continual preference fine-tuning to make the reward model prefer aligned LGTs even further and (ii) reward modeling of Human/LLM mixed texts (a rephrased texts from human-written texts using aligned LLMs), which serves as a median preference text corpus between LGTs and human-written texts to learn the decision boundary better. We provide an extensive evaluation by considering six text domains across twelve aligned LLMs, where our method demonstrates state-of-the-art results. Code is available at https://github.com/hyunseoklee-ai/ReMoDetect.
This paper explores an automatic news generation and fact-checking system based on language processing, aimed at enhancing the efficiency and quality of news production while ensuring the authenticity and reliability of the news content. With the rapid development of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and deep learning technologies, automatic news generation systems are capable of extracting key information from massive data and generating well-structured, fluent news articles. Meanwhile, by integrating fact-checking technology, the system can effectively prevent the spread of false news and improve the accuracy and credibility of news. This study details the key technologies involved in automatic news generation and factchecking, including text generation, information extraction, and the application of knowledge graphs, and validates the effectiveness of these technologies through experiments. Additionally, the paper discusses the future development directions of automatic news generation and fact-checking systems, emphasizing the importance of further integration and innovation of technologies. The results show that with continuous technological optimization and practical application, these systems will play an increasingly important role in the future news industry, providing more efficient and reliable news services.
With the improvements in generative models, the issues of producing hallucinations in various domains (e.g., law, writing) have been brought to people's attention due to concerns about misinformation. In this paper, we focus on neural fake news, which refers to content generated by neural networks aiming to mimic the style of real news to deceive people. To prevent harmful disinformation spreading fallaciously from malicious social media (e.g., content farms), we propose a novel verification framework, Style-News, using publisher metadata to imply a publisher's template with the corresponding text types, political stance, and credibility. Based on threat modeling aspects, a style-aware neural news generator is introduced as an adversary for generating news content conditioning for a specific publisher, and style and source discriminators are trained to defend against this attack by identifying which publisher the style corresponds with, and discriminating whether the source of the given news is human-written or machine-generated. To evaluate the quality of the generated content, we integrate various dimensional metrics (language fluency, content preservation, and style adherence) and demonstrate that Style-News significantly outperforms the previous approaches by a margin of 0.35 for fluency, 15.24 for content, and 0.38 for style at most. Moreover, our discriminative model outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in terms of publisher prediction (up to 4.64%) and neural fake news detection (+6.94% $\sim$ 31.72%).
Recent Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in generating text that closely resembles human writing across wide range of styles and genres. However, such capabilities are prone to potential abuse, such as fake news generation, spam email creation, and misuse in academic assignments. Hence, it is essential to build automated approaches capable of distinguishing between artificially generated text and human-authored text. In this paper, we propose a simple yet efficient solution to this problem by ensembling predictions from multiple constituent LLMs. Compared to previous state-of-the-art approaches, which are perplexity-based or uses ensembles with a number of LLMs, our condensed ensembling approach uses only two constituent LLMs to achieve comparable performance. Experiments conducted on four benchmark datasets for generative text classification show performance improvements in the range of 0.5 to 100\% compared to previous state-of-the-art approaches. We also study the influence that the training data from individual LLMs have on model performance. We found that substituting commercially-restrictive Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) data with data generated from other open language models such as Falcon, Large Language Model Meta AI (LLaMA2), and Mosaic Pretrained Transformers (MPT) is a feasible alternative when developing generative text detectors. Furthermore, to demonstrate zero-shot generalization, we experimented with an English essays dataset, and results suggest that our ensembling approach can handle new data effectively.
The rampant spread of fake news has adversely affected society, resulting in extensive research on curbing its spread. As a notable milestone in large language models (LLMs), ChatGPT has gained significant attention due to its exceptional natural language processing capabilities. In this study, we present a thorough exploration of ChatGPT's proficiency in generating, explaining, and detecting fake news as follows. Generation -- We employ four prompt methods to generate fake news samples and prove the high quality of these samples through both self-assessment and human evaluation. Explanation -- We obtain nine features to characterize fake news based on ChatGPT's explanations and analyze the distribution of these factors across multiple public datasets. Detection -- We examine ChatGPT's capacity to identify fake news. We explore its detection consistency and then propose a reason-aware prompt method to improve its performance. Although our experiments demonstrate that ChatGPT shows commendable performance in detecting fake news, there is still room for its improvement. Consequently, we further probe into the potential extra information that could bolster its effectiveness in detecting fake news.
Fine-grained, span-level human evaluation has emerged as a reliable and robust method for evaluating text generation tasks such as summarization, simplification, machine translation and news generation, and the derived annotations have been useful for training automatic metrics and improving language models. However, existing annotation tools implemented for these evaluation frameworks lack the adaptability to be extended to different domains or languages, or modify annotation settings according to user needs; and, the absence of a unified annotated data format inhibits the research in multi-task learning. In this paper, we introduce Thresh, a unified, customizable and deployable platform for fine-grained evaluation. With a single YAML configuration file, users can build and test an annotation interface for any framework within minutes -- all in one web browser window. To facilitate collaboration and sharing, Thresh provides a community hub that hosts a collection of fine-grained frameworks and corresponding annotations made and collected by the community, covering a wide range of NLP tasks. For deployment, Thresh offers multiple options for any scale of annotation projects from small manual inspections to large crowdsourcing ones. Additionally, we introduce a Python library to streamline the entire process from typology design and deployment to annotation processing. Thresh is publicly accessible at https://thresh.tools.
Automatically generating textual content with desired attributes is an ambitious task that people have pursued long. Existing works have made a series of progress in incorporating unimodal controls into language models (LMs), whereas how to generate controllable sentences with multimodal signals and high efficiency remains an open question. To tackle the puzzle, we propose a new paradigm of zero-shot controllable text generation with multimodal signals (\textsc{ZeroGen}). Specifically, \textsc{ZeroGen} leverages controls of text and image successively from token-level to sentence-level and maps them into a unified probability space at decoding, which customizes the LM outputs by weighted addition without extra training. To achieve better inter-modal trade-offs, we further introduce an effective dynamic weighting mechanism to regulate all control weights. Moreover, we conduct substantial experiments to probe the relationship of being in-depth or in-width between signals from distinct modalities. Encouraging empirical results on three downstream tasks show that \textsc{ZeroGen} not only outperforms its counterparts on captioning tasks by a large margin but also shows great potential in multimodal news generation with a higher degree of control. Our code will be released at https://github.com/ImKeTT/ZeroGen.
Personalized content-based recommender systems have become indispensable tools for users to navigate through the vast amount of content available on platforms like daily news websites and book recommendation services. However, existing recommenders face significant challenges in understanding the content of items. Large language models (LLMs), which possess deep semantic comprehension and extensive knowledge from pretraining, have proven to be effective in various natural language processing tasks. In this study, we explore the potential of leveraging both open- and closed-source LLMs to enhance content-based recommendation. With open-source LLMs, we utilize their deep layers as content encoders, enriching the representation of content at the embedding level. For closed-source LLMs, we employ prompting techniques to enrich the training data at the token level. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate the high effectiveness of both types of LLMs and show the synergistic relationship between them. Notably, we observed a significant relative improvement of up to 19.32% compared to existing state-of-the-art recommendation models. These findings highlight the immense potential of both open- and closed-source of LLMs in enhancing content-based recommendation systems. We will make our code and LLM-generated data available for other researchers to reproduce our results.
Instruction tuning enables language models to more effectively generalize and better follow user intent. However, obtaining instruction data is costly and challenging. Prior work employs methods such as expensive human annotation, crowd-sourced datasets with alignment issues, and generating noisy examples via LLMs. We introduce the LongForm-C dataset, which is created by reverse instructions. We generate instructions via LLMs for human-written corpus examples using reverse instructions. First we select a diverse set of human-written documents from corpora such as C4 and Wikipedia; then we generate instructions for these documents via LLMs. This approach provides a cheaper and cleaner instruction-tuning dataset with natural output and one suitable for long text generation. Our models outperform 10x larger language models without instruction tuning on tasks such as story/recipe generation and long-form question answering. Moreover, LongForm models outperform prior instruction-tuned models such as FLAN-T5 and Alpaca by a large margin, and improve language understanding capabilities further. We publicly release our data and models: https://github.com/akoksal/LongForm.
Media news are making a large part of public opinion and, therefore, must not be fake. News on web sites, blogs, and social media must be analyzed before being published. In this paper, we present linguistic characteristics of media news items to differentiate between fake news and real news using machine learning algorithms. Neural fake news generation, headlines created by machines, semantic incongruities in text and image captions generated by machine are other types of fake news problems. These problems use neural networks which mainly control distributional features rather than evidence. We propose applying correlation between features set and class, and correlation among the features to compute correlation attribute evaluation metric and covariance metric to compute variance of attributes over the news items. Features unique, negative, positive, and cardinal numbers with high values on the metrics are observed to provide a high area under the curve (AUC) and F1-score.
Despite recent advances in detecting fake news generated by neural models, their results are not readily applicable to effective detection of human-written disinformation. What limits the successful transfer between them is the sizable gap between machine-generated fake news and human-authored ones, including the notable differences in terms of style and underlying intent. With this in mind, we propose a novel framework for generating training examples that are informed by the known styles and strategies of human-authored propaganda. Specifically, we perform self-critical sequence training guided by natural language inference to ensure the validity of the generated articles, while also incorporating propaganda techniques, such as appeal to authority and loaded language. In particular, we create a new training dataset, PropaNews, with 2,256 examples, which we release for future use. Our experimental results show that fake news detectors trained on PropaNews are better at detecting human-written disinformation by 3.62 - 7.69% F1 score on two public datasets.
Article comprehension is an important challenge in natural language processing with many applications such as article generation or image-to-article retrieval. Prior work typically encodes all tokens in articles uniformly using pretrained language models. However, in many applications, such as understanding news stories, these articles are based on real-world events and may reference many named entities that are difficult to accurately recognize and predict by language models. To address this challenge, we propose an ENtity-aware article GeneratIoN and rEtrieval (ENGINE) framework, to explicitly incorporate named entities into language models. ENGINE has two main components: a named-entity extraction module to extract named entities from both metadata and embedded images associated with articles, and an entity-aware mechanism that enhances the model's ability to recognize and predict entity names. We conducted experiments on three public datasets: GoodNews, VisualNews, and WikiText, where our results demonstrate that our model can boost both article generation and article retrieval performance, with a 4-5 perplexity improvement in article generation and a 3-4% boost in recall@1 in article retrieval. We release our implementation at https://github.com/Zhongping-Zhang/ENGINE .
Automated news generation has become a major interest for new agencies in the past. Oftentimes headlines for such automatically generated news articles are unimaginative as they have been generated with ready-made templates. We present a computationally creative approach for headline generation that can generate humorous versions of existing headlines. We evaluate our system with human judges and compare the results to human authored humorous titles. The headlines produced by the system are considered funny 36\% of the time by human evaluators.
News recommendation is important for personalized online news services. Most existing news recommendation methods rely on centrally stored user behavior data to both train models offline and provide online recommendation services. However, user data is usually highly privacy-sensitive, and centrally storing them may raise privacy concerns and risks. In this paper, we propose a unified news recommendation framework, which can utilize user data locally stored in user clients to train models and serve users in a privacy-preserving way. Following a widely used paradigm in real-world recommender systems, our framework contains two stages. The first one is for candidate news generation (i.e., recall) and the second one is for candidate news ranking (i.e., ranking). At the recall stage, each client locally learns multiple interest representations from clicked news to comprehensively model user interests. These representations are uploaded to the server to recall candidate news from a large news pool, which are further distributed to the user client at the ranking stage for personalized news display. In addition, we propose an interest decomposer-aggregator method with perturbation noise to better protect private user information encoded in user interest representations. Besides, we collaboratively train both recall and ranking models on the data decentralized in a large number of user clients in a privacy-preserving way. Experiments on two real-world news datasets show that our method can outperform baseline methods and effectively protect user privacy.
Recently, pre-trained transformer-based architectures have proven to be very efficient at language modeling and understanding, given that they are trained on a large enough corpus. Applications in language generation for Arabic are still lagging in comparison to other NLP advances primarily due to the lack of advanced Arabic language generation models. In this paper, we develop the first advanced Arabic language generation model, AraGPT2, trained from scratch on a large Arabic corpus of internet text and news articles. Our largest model, AraGPT2-mega, has 1.46 billion parameters, which makes it the largest Arabic language model available. The Mega model was evaluated and showed success on different tasks including synthetic news generation, and zero-shot question answering. For text generation, our best model achieves a perplexity of 29.8 on held-out Wikipedia articles. A study conducted with human evaluators showed the significant success of AraGPT2-mega in generating news articles that are difficult to distinguish from articles written by humans. We thus develop and release an automatic discriminator model with a 98% percent accuracy in detecting model-generated text. The models are also publicly available, hoping to encourage new research directions and applications for Arabic NLP.