Algorithm can spot lies in emails and dating sites
Algorithm can spot lies in emails and dating sites
The algorithm could help protect organisations spot scam
emails and lying customers
By Cara McGoogan 5
JULY 2016 • 1:35PM
Researchers have created a computer program that can
detect lies, be it an email, dating profile or visa application.
The algorithm created at City University London can tell
if a person is lying just by analysing their word use, structure and context,
according to the researchers.
To create the algorithm, researchers compared text in
tens of thousands of emails that contained lies and truthful contents.
The comparison revealed that people who are lying are
less likely to use personal pronouns - such as "I", "me",
"mine" - and tend to use more adjectives, such as
"brilliant" and "sublime". Reasons for this language use
could be that liars try to dissociate themselves from the content of a message,
while clouding its meaning in unnecessary description.
Other clues that someone is lying include linking
sentences to each other so that thoughts appear to be connected, and mirroring
the sentence structure of the person they're communicating with.
The algorithm is better at detecting lies than the
average human. People manage to spot a lie 54 per cent of the time, according
to the researchers, whereas the computer lie detector detects it 70 per cent of
the time.
"Humans are startlingly bad at consciously detecting
deception," said Tom van Laer, one of the researchers who specialises in
marketing at the Cass Business School, City University London.
It was designed to help organisations protect themselves
against scam or phishing emails, which can lead to identity theft and financial
loss.
"We want to put it to work to fight fraud wherever
it occurs in computerised content," said van Laer. "And as the
technology evolves, we want to wholly automate its warning."
But before it can be put into practice van Laer said they
want to increase the algorithm's accuracy.
When it comes to messages from a contact that you know,
the best ways to spot a lie include looking out for deviations from the normal
pattern of writing, non-committal phrases, such as "pretty sure",
"maybe" and "probably",
changes in tense in the middle of a story, and qualifying statements,
such as "to be honest" and "I hate to tell you".
In a separate study, researchers at the University of
Michigan taught computers to detect lies using courtroom videos. The machine
learning algorithm was able to identify people telling the truth 75 per cent of
the time.
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