Innovations in Automated Deception Detection

Dear Colleagues,

The ability to detect deceptive communication is one of the key challenges in contemporary computing. In news and social media, deception is studied in terms of the problem of fake news. In marketing, the subject of research is the detection of fake, commercially beneficial, or harmful opinions known as opinion spam. Recently, the need for checking veracity emerged in the context of generative artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs), addressing issues of hallucination detection and mitigation.

Due to the high cost and effort of human veracity checking, researchers tend to turn to computer-based, automated means of identifying deceptive and fake content. Popular assessment techniques involve natural language processing, both style-based and fact-checking; image processing; and the recently developed prompt engineering for the detection of non-truthful statements in LLM answers.

The focus of this Special Issue is on how machine learning and artificial intelligence might and can be used to detect deception in relation to both human and AI-generated content. We welcome submissions focusing on any data type, including text, social media, images, and combined modalities.

This Special Issue will cover a wide array of topics, including (but not limited to) the following:

• Computer-based detection of fake news;
• Stylometric and psycholinguistic methods in deception detection;
• Multimodal deception detection;
• Automated fact checking;
• Detecting lies and hallucinations in LLM text generation;
• Prompt engineering for deception detection;
• Explainable AI applied to deception detection;
• Comparison of human vs. AI-generated false utterances.

Dr. Aleksander Wawer
Dr. Justyna Sarzyńska-Wawer
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Informatics is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• deception detection
• automated fact checking
• computer-based claim verification
• fake news detection
• recognizing opinion spam
• NLP for fake news detection
• video and image processing for deception detection