# Countering Misinformation via Emotional Response Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.10587 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10587/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [FEVER: a large-scale dataset for Fact Extraction and VERification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05355/) (2018)
- [PEGASUS: Pre-training with Extracted Gap-sentences for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08777/) (2019)
- [Adafactor: Adaptive Learning Rates with Sublinear Memory Cost](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04235/) (2018)
- [BARTScore: Evaluating Generated Text as Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11520/) (2021)
- [Fact or Fiction: Verifying Scientific Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14974/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Automated Fact-Checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11896/) (2021)
- ["Liar, Liar Pants on Fire": A New Benchmark Dataset for Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.00648/) (2017)
- [Explainable Automated Fact-Checking for Public Health Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09926/) (2020)
- [MultiFC: A Real-World Multi-Domain Dataset for Evidence-Based Fact Checking of Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03242/) (2019)
- [Generating Fact Checking Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05773/) (2020)
- [GCAN: Graph-aware Co-Attention Networks for Explainable Fake News Detection on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11648/) (2020)
- [DeClarE: Debunking Fake News and False Claims using Evidence-Aware Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.06416/) (2018)
- [COVID-Fact: Fact Extraction and Verification of Real-World Claims on COVID-19 Pandemic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03794/) (2021)
- [The science of fake news](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07903/) (2023)
- [Explainable Automated Fact-Checking: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.03870/) (2020)
- [A Stylometric Inquiry into Hyperpartisan and Fake News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05638/) (2017)
- [Human-in-the-Loop for Data Collection: a Multi-Target Counter Narrative Dataset to Fight Online Hate Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08720/) (2021)
- [Generating Counter Narratives against Online Hate Speech: Data and Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04216/) (2020)
- [Reinforcement Learning-based Counter-Misinformation Response Generation: A Case Study of COVID-19 Vaccine Misinformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06433/) (2023)
- [Multi-Hop Fact Checking of Political Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06401/) (2020)
- [XFake: Explainable Fake News Detector with Visualizations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07757/) (2019)
- [Benchmarking the Generation of Fact Checking Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15202/) (2023)
- [The Role of the Crowd in Countering Misinformation: A Case Study of the COVID-19 Infodemic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.05773/) (2020)
- [Explainable Fact Checking with Probabilistic Answer Set Programming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.09198/) (2019)
- [Community-Based Fact-Checking on Twitter's Birdwatch Platform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07175/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [DELL: Generating Reactions and Explanations for LLM-Based Misinformation Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10426/) (2024)
- [LlamaLens: Specialized Multilingual LLM for Analyzing News and Social Media Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15308/) (2024)
- [On the Risk of Evidence Pollution for Malicious Social Text Detection in the Era of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12600/) (2024)
- [When Harry Meets Superman: The Role of The Interlocutor in Persona-Based Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24613/) (2025)
- [Fine-tuning with HED-IT: The impact of human post-editing for dialogical language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07288/) (2024)
- [Beating Harmful Stereotypes Through Facts: RAG-based Counter-speech Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12316/) (2025)
- [Mitigating GenAI-Powered Evidence Pollution for Out-Of-Context Misinformation Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.14728/) (2025)
- [Incongruent Positivity: When Miscalibrated Positivity Undermines Online Supportive Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.10184/) (2025)
- [LLMberjack: Guided Trimming of Debate Trees for Multi-Party Conversation Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04135/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The proliferation of misinformation on social media platforms (SMPs) poses a significant danger to public health, social cohesion and ultimately democracy. Previous research has shown how social correction can be an effective way to curb misinformation, by engaging directly in a constructive dialogue with users who spread -- often in good faith -- misleading messages. Although professional fact-checkers are crucial to debunking viral claims, they usually do not engage in conversations on social media. Thereby, significant effort has been made to automate the use of fact-checker material in social correction; however, no previous work has tried to integrate it with the style and pragmatics that are commonly employed in social media communication. To fill this gap, we present VerMouth, the first large-scale dataset comprising roughly 12 thousand claim-response pairs (linked to debunking articles), accounting for both SMP-style and basic emotions, two factors which have a significant role in misinformation credibility and spreading. To collect this dataset we used a technique based on an author-reviewer pipeline, which efficiently combines LLMs and human annotators to obtain high-quality data. We also provide comprehensive experiments showing how models trained on our proposed dataset have significant improvements in terms of output quality and generalization capabilities.