2026/07/31 by Theekshana Samaradiwakara, Nisansa de Silva, George C. Lobb
Computer Science · #cs.CL #cs.AI
published as ICAIL 2026 · 5 pages paper
arxiv created 2026/07/31 · arxiv updated 2026/08/03
Deception detection has critical implications for legal proceedings, law enforcement, and online security. Although human judgment is limited in accuracy and scalability, Natural Language Processing (NLP) offers a data-driven alternative. We present a survey and comparative analysis of NLP-based Automatic Deception Detection (ADD) focusing on the legal domain, reviewing the evolution from feature-based machine learning to Large Language Model (LLM) approaches. We conduct a unified empirical evaluation across seven datasets (two legal, five general-domain), comparing six fine-tuned transformer models and seven LLMs under four prompting strategies. The results show strong domain sensitivity, with fine-tuned models excelling in data-rich general domains and few-shot LLMs remaining competitive in low-resource legal settings. Chain-of-Thought prompting often underperforms direct classification. These findings highlight the need for domain adaptation and interpretable systems in high-stakes legal contexts.