Urban legends are viral deceptive texts, in between credible and incredible.To be credible they mimic news articles while being incredible like a fairy tale.High level features: "who where when" of news, "emotional readable" of fairy tales.Quantitative analysis and machine learning experiments for recognizing urban legends. Urban legends are a genre of modern folklore, consisting of stories about rare and exceptional events, just plausible enough to be believed, which tend to propagate inexorably across communities. In our view, while urban legends represent a form of "sticky" deceptive text, they are marked by a tension between the credible and incredible. They should be credible like a news article and incredible like a fairy tale to go viral. In particular we will focus on the idea that urban legends should mimic the details of news (who, where, when) to be credible, while they should be emotional and readable like a fairy tale to be catchy and memorable. Using NLP tools we will provide a quantitative analysis of these prototypical characteristics. We also lay out some machine learning experiments showing that it is possible to recognize an urban legend using just these simple features.
The research described in this work focuses on identifying key components for the task of irony detection. By means of analyzing a set of customer reviews, which are considered ironic both in social and mass media, we try to find hints about how to deal with this task from a computational point of view. Our objective is to gather a set of discriminating elements to represent irony, in particular, the kind of irony expressed in such reviews. To this end, we built a freely available data set with ironic reviews collected from Amazon. Such reviews were posted on the basis of an online viral effect; i.e. contents that trigger a chain reaction in people. The findings were assessed employing three classifiers. Initial results are largely positive, and provide valuable insights into the subjective issues of language facing tasks such as sentiment analysis, opinion mining and decision making.