English

The Mafiascum Dataset: A Large Text Corpus for Deception Detection

Computation and Language 2019-08-15 v3

Abstract

Detecting deception in natural language has a wide variety of applications, but because of its hidden nature there are currently no public, large-scale sources of labeled deceptive text. This work introduces the Mafiascum dataset [1], a collection of over 700 games of Mafia, in which players are randomly assigned either deceptive or non-deceptive roles and then interact via forum postings. Over 9000 documents were compiled from the dataset, which each contained all messages written by a single player in a single game. This corpus was used to construct a set of hand-picked linguistic features based on prior deception research, as well as a set of average word vectors enriched with subword information. A logistic regression classifier fit on a combination of these feature sets achieved an average precision of 0.39 (chance = 0.26) and an AUROC of 0.68 on 5000+ word documents. On 50+ word documents, an average precision of 0.29 (chance = 0.23) and an AUROC of 0.59 was achieved. [1] https://bitbucket.org/bopjesvla/thesis/src

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1811.07851,
  title  = {The Mafiascum Dataset: A Large Text Corpus for Deception Detection},
  author = {Bob de Ruiter and George Kachergis},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.07851},
  year   = {2019}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T05:20:57.437Z