Papers › Factuality Checking in News Headlines with Eye Tracking

Factuality Checking in News Headlines with Eye Tracking

17 Jun 2020arXiv:2006.09736archive 2025-07-28

Christian Hansen, Casper Hansen, Jakob Grue Simonsen, Birger Larsen, Stephen Alstrup, Christina Lioma

We study whether it is possible to infer if a news headline is true or false using only the movement of the human eyes when reading news headlines. Our study with 55 participants who are eye-tracked when reading 108 news headlines (72 true, 36 false) shows that false headlines receive statistically significantly less visual attention than true headlines. We further build an ensemble learner that predicts news headline factuality using only eye-tracking measurements. Our model yields a mean AUC of 0.688 and is better at detecting false than true headlines. Through a model analysis, we find that eye-tracking 25 users when reading 3-6 headlines is sufficient for our ensemble learner.

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