# MINT -- Mainstream and Independent News Text Corpus

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.06249 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06249/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Aug 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Automatic Detection of Fake News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07104/) (2017)
- [A Stylometric Inquiry into Hyperpartisan and Fake News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05638/) (2017)
- [This Just In: Fake News Packs a Lot in Title, Uses Simpler, Repetitive Content in Text Body, More Similar to Satire than Real News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09398/) (2017)
- [NELA-GT-2020: A Large Multi-Labelled News Dataset for The Study of Misinformation in News Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04567/) (2021)
- [Some Like it Hoax: Automated Fake News Detection in Social Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.07506/) (2017)
- [In Search of Credible News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08125/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Most corpora approach misinformation as a binary problem, classifying texts as real or fake. However, they fail to consider the diversity of existing textual genres and types, which present different properties usually associated with credibility. To address this problem, we created MINT, a comprehensive corpus of news articles collected from mainstream and independent Portuguese media sources, over a full year period. MINT includes five categories of content: hard news, opinion articles, soft news, satirical news, and conspiracy theories. This paper presents a set of linguistic metrics for characterization of the articles in each category, based on the analysis of an annotation initiative performed by online readers. The results show that (i) conspiracy theories and opinion articles present similar levels of subjectivity, and make use of fallacious arguments; (ii) irony and sarcasm are not only prevalent in satirical news, but also in conspiracy and opinion news articles; and (iii) hard news differ from soft news by resorting to more sources of information, and presenting a higher degree of objectivity.