Automating the Application of Deception Detection Heuristics to Open Sources

We propose to construct an intelligent software agent system for identifying misleading information, called Skeptic, which exploits scaffolding provided by a collection of largely domain-independent deception detection heuristics. These heuristics provideSkeptic with a significant advantage over purely inductive methods by allowing it to exploit the adversarial nature of this problem. The result is a system that will effectively anticipate actions of the adversary and inform an evidential reasoning system.Skeptic will be the first deception detection system to employ information extraction to allow the detection of misleading information from Web sites and other open sources. Further, Skeptic will adapt over time, which means it can be deployed early, andmature as the understanding of the problem matures. In our Phase I investigation, which targeted a particular class of deception called