Text Analysis in Adversarial Settings: Does Deception Leave a Stylistic Trace?
This addresses the challenge of online security by analyzing deception detection and author obfuscation, but it is incremental as it synthesizes and critiques existing literature without introducing new methods.
The paper tackles the problem of detecting textual deception by reviewing existing studies and finds that linguistic features indicative of deception do not generalize across domains, suggesting no content-invariant stylistic trace exists, and textual similarity measures are better for classification. It also reviews style obfuscation for hiding author identity, concluding current methods fail to reliably obfuscate while maintaining semantic faithfulness.
Textual deception constitutes a major problem for online security. Many studies have argued that deceptiveness leaves traces in writing style, which could be detected using text classification techniques. By conducting an extensive literature review of existing empirical work, we demonstrate that while certain linguistic features have been indicative of deception in certain corpora, they fail to generalize across divergent semantic domains. We suggest that deceptiveness as such leaves no content-invariant stylistic trace, and textual similarity measures provide superior means of classifying texts as potentially deceptive. Additionally, we discuss forms of deception beyond semantic content, focusing on hiding author identity by writing style obfuscation. Surveying the literature on both author identification and obfuscation techniques, we conclude that current style transformation methods fail to achieve reliable obfuscation while simultaneously ensuring semantic faithfulness to the original text. We propose that future work in style transformation should pay particular attention to disallowing semantically drastic changes.