Silje Susanne Alvestad

• Brandtzæg, Petter Bae; Alvestad, Silje Susanne; Kunst, Jonas R. & Følstad, Asbjørn (2026). Professional and community-based fact-checking show different strengths, but neither performs strongly across trust, scalability, and impact. Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review. 7(4), s. 1–27. doi: 10.37016/mr-2020-206. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Fact-checking on social media matters more than ever. When Meta abandoned professional fact checkers in 2025 in favour of crowd-sourced annotations, it bet that community participation could substitute for institutional expertise. Our systematic review of 21 empirical studies of social media fact-checking (2022–2025) suggests the picture is more complicated than it appears. Community-based fact-checking is faster and scalable, whereas professional fact checkers are generally more trusted but often slow. Neither model, on its own, performs strongly across trust, scalability, and impact. The evidence suggests that hybrid systems combining community speed with expert verification are likely to be the most effective approach.

• Alvestad, Silje Susanne & Põldvere, Nele (2026). Fake News, Real Threat: Linguistics as a Line of Defence Against Disinformation. I Hagen, Anne Marie & Enstad, Kjetil (Red.), Advancing Military Practice through Military Humanities. Routledge. ISSN 9781003738886. s. 79–97. doi: 10.4324/9781003738886-8. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  This chapter covers how linguistics can contribute to developing Military Humanities as a field by showing how, particularly, corpus linguistics can serve as part of the line of defence against fake news and (other types of) disinformation. The authors draw on their experiences and insights from the Fakespeak project devoted to the identification of fake news based on linguistic cues. Their contribution to this volume is twofold: in the first, theoretical part, the authors place their research topic in a broader context, outline a framework for understanding fake news in the two dimensions “veracity” and “honesty” and in terms of mis- and disinformation, and present some findings and observations from the Fakespeak project. The second, empirical part is a close investigation of linguistic features of genuine versus fake news in English on the topic of war and, hence, an illustration of how linguistic methods can be applied as tools that can help identify misleading textual contents. Thus, the chapter shows how insights from linguistics, through its emphasis on critical thinking and rigorous methods, can contribute not just to strengthening military education and practice but even to enhancing societal resilience against disinformation.

• Saric, Ljiljana & Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2026). Slavonic noun phrases, The Oxford Guide to the Slavonic Languages. Oxford University Press. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Poldvere, Nele & Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2026). Corpus linguistics and fake news. I Nesi, Hilary & Milin, Petar (Red.), Reference Module in Social Sciences. Elsevier. ISSN 9780443157851. doi: 10.1016/B978-0-323-95504-1.00463-4. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  This article summarizes the main aspects of a burgeoning field of study in corpus linguistics, namely, the language of fake news. The topic of fake news raises new conceptual and practical challenges for corpus linguists, from how fake news should be defined to the best practices of data collection. In the article we also provide an overview of the main linguistic features that have been found to characterize fake news, including lexico-grammatical, socio-cognitive and discourse-pragmatic features.

• Kibisova, Elizaveta & Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2025). Fakespeak-RUS: Building a corpus of Russian fake news. Linguistics Vanguard. doi: 10.1515/lingvan-2024-0198. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2023). Towards detecting the language of disinformation: Experiences from the Fakespeak project. Collection of the Scientific Papers of the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies of the National Defence University of Ukraine. ISSN 2304-2745. doi: 10.33099/2304-2745/2023-3-79/84-88. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Poldvere, Nele; Kibisova, Elizaveta & Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2023). Investigating the language of fake news across cultures. I Maci, Stefania; Demata, Massimiliano; McGlashan, Mark & Seargeant, Philip (Red.), The Routledge Handbook of Discourse and Disinformation. Routledge. ISSN 9781003224495. s. 153–165. doi: 10.4324/9781003224495-11. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  This chapter presents the methodological considerations, the challenges and the opportunities, of investigating the language of fake news across cultures. The methodological considerations are based on the Fakespeak project, an interdisciplinary project involving linguists and computer scientists whose objectives are, firstly, to reveal the language and style of fake news in English, Norwegian, and Russian and, secondly, to see whether the findings can help improve existing fake news detection systems. The procedure of collecting data in the three languages representing three different cultures (e.g. English in the USA) presented several methodological challenges, which required innovative solutions. The challenges were quite different in each case, with access to quality data (collections of fake and genuine news individually labelled for veracity by experts) being especially limited for Norwegian and Russian, albeit for different reasons. The datasets that have emerged from the Fakespeak project so far are very diverse, including both large datasets with news written by a mix of authors (so-called general datasets) and smaller datasets with fake and genuine news written by the same author (single-authored and hybrid, multiauthored datasets). The diversity of data types is important for linguistic analyses of fake news so that meaningful comparisons with genuine news can be made, as well as for the subsequent development of automatic detection systems.

• Alvestad, Silje Susanne & Saric, Ljiljana (2018). De-type discourse particles in Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, and Turkish. Turcologica. ISSN 0177-4743. s. 11–31. doi: 10.2307/j.ctvh4zh3p.7. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2017). Aspect use in Slavic infinitives and corresponding da-constructions :. Oslo Studies in Language (OSLa). 9(1), s. 5–16. doi: 10.5617/osla.3866. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  In Dickey (2000), the most comprehensive comparative account of aspect use in Slavic to date, ten Slavic languages are considered based on seven parameters of use, but two important verb forms are not accounted for: the imperative and the infinitive. The imperative was dealt with in Benacchio (2010), von Waldenfels (2012), and Alvestad (2013). Now it is time the infinitive receives its fair share of attention too. Thus, in a larger project I compare how aspect is used in the infinitive in Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Polish, Upper Sorbian, Czech, Slovak, Serbian, Croatian and Slovene and in the corresponding da-constructions in Bulgarian and Macedonian (and Serbian, Croatian and Slovene) based on a study of several parallel-annotated novels in the ParaSol corpus. Against the background of existing literature, one hypothesis could be that (i) in the infinitive, the freedom of choice is significant as far as aspect use is concerned (see, e.g. Galton (1976)), and (ii) the East-West divide in aspect use can be observed in the infinitive too. My initial findings, however, which are from Russian and Croatian and presented in this paper, suggest that (i) must be rejected and (ii) must be modified; in East Slavic, the perfective aspect is far more widespread in the infinitive than in the other verb forms. From this starting point I outline, towards the end of the article, how we can proceed to be able to account for the findings within a formal theoretical framework. The picture of how aspect is used in the Slavic languages is not complete until infinitives, and the corresponding da-constructions, are accounted for.

• Alvestad, Silje Susanne & Edzard, Lutz (2016). Aspect in the Biblical Hebrew imperative from a modern Slavic perspective. I Edzard, Lutz (Red.), The Morpho-Syntactic and Lexical Encoding of Tense and Aspect in Semitic. Harrassowitz Verlag. ISSN 9783447106221. s. 22–52. doi: 10.2307/j.ctvc5pg9t.5. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2015). The typology of aspect in the Slavic imperative. I Lyutikova, Ekaterina; Zimmerling, Anton & Konoshenko, Maria (Red.), Tipologija morfosintaksicheskikh parametrov. Materialy mezhdunarodnoj konferencii "Tipologija morfosintaksicheskikh parametrov 2015". Moscow State Pedagogical University. ISSN 9785426302938. s. 15–24. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2015). Event token and event type anaphora in Slavic imperatives. I Zybatow, Gerhild; Biskup, Petr; Guhl, Marcel; Hurtig, Claudia; Mueller-Reichau, Olav & Yastrebova, Maria (Red.), Slavic Grammar from a Formal Perspective. The 10th Anniversary FDSL Conference, Leipzig 2013. Peter Lang Publishing Group. ISSN 9783631662465. s. 11–27. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2015). Aspect use in the Slavic infinitive (and subjunctive). I Kitajo, Mitsushi (Red.), Aspektual'naja semanticheskaja zona: tipologija sistem i scenarii diakhronicheskogo razvitija. Sbornik statej V Mezhdunarodnoj konferencii Komissii po aspektologii Mezhdunarodnogo komiteta slavistov. Tanaka Print. ISSN 9784905726357. s. 7–14. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2015). A DRT Account of Event Type Anaphora in Slavic Imperatives: Cases with a Covert Antecedent. I McCready, Eric (Red.), The Proceedings of the Twelfth International Workshop on Logic and Engineering of Natural Language Semantics (LENLS 12). Keio University. ISSN 9784915905681. s. 255–270. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2015). Canonical and non-canonical uses of the imperative in Slavic. I Edzard, Lutz (Red.), Arabic and Semitic Linguistics Contextualized. Harrassowitz Verlag. ISSN 9783447104227. s. 19–39. doi: 10.2307/j.ctvc2rmgq.6. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne & Edzard, Lutz (2015). Aspect in the Slavic and the Biblical Hebrew imperative. I Edzard, Lutz (Red.), Arabic and Semitic Linguistics Contextualized. Harrassowitz Verlag. ISSN 9783447104227. s. 361–390. doi: 10.2307/j.ctvc2rmgq.23. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2014). Muhamed Hevai Uskufi Bosnevi’s 1631 work Maḳbūl-i ʿārif from a turcological perspective: The state of the art. I Edzard, Lutz & Huehnergard, John (Red.), Proceedings of the Oslo-Austin Workshop in Semitic Linguistics. Oslo, May 23 and 24, 2013. Harrassowitz Verlag. ISSN 9783447102278. s. 144–160. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2014). Arebica (Arabica). Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics Online. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2014). Evaluative Language in Academic Discourse: Euphemisms vs. Dysphemisms in ANDREWS’ & KALPAKLI’s "The Age of Beloveds" (2005) as a case in point. Journal of Arabic and Islamic studies. s. 155–177. doi: 10.5617/jais.4643. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2014). Fake imperfective imperatives in Slavic. Oslo Studies in Language (OSLa). 6(1), s. 1–14. doi: 10.5617/osla.692. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2014). Aspect use in the imperative and the prescriptive infinitive in recipes in Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian and Russian: A comparative account. Jezikoslovlje. ISSN 1331-7202. 15(2-3), s. 307–347. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv

Se alle arbeider i NVA

• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2016). The Uppsala manuscript of Muḥammed Hevāʾī Üskūfī Bosnevī´s "Maḳbūl-i ʿārif" (1631) from a turcological perspective: Transliteration, transcription, and an English translation. Harrassowitz Verlag. ISBN 9783447106351. 164 s. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv

Se alle arbeider i NVA

• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2026). Falske nyheter - reelle utfordringer: et språkvitenskapelig perspektiv. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2026). Interdisciplinary encounters with disinformation: Lessons from the Fakespeak and NxtGenFake projects. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2026). KI-generert desinformasjon: Identifisering basert på språklige kjennetegn. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne & Poldvere, Nele (2026). Corpus and computational linguistics meet fake news, mis- and disinformation and LLMs. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2026). Overbevisningskraften i store språkmodeller: En NxtGenFake pilotstudie. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2026). Falske nyheter, reelle bekymringer: Et språkvitenskapelig perspektiv. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2026). KI-erfaringer fra Språk- og etterretningsskolen. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2026). MINDCRAFT: Kognitivt forsvar fra et språkvitenskapelig perspektiv. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2026). KI-lunsj: Har Wikipedia en framtid? Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2026). Kunstig intelligens gjør falske nyheter mer troverdige. [Internet]. Forskning.no. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne; Poldvere, Nele; Følstad, Asbjørn & Brandtzæg, Petter Bae (2025). Human - chatbot interaction: The case of disinformation in Large Language Models. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne; Poldvere, Nele; Følstad, Asbjørn & Brandtzæg, Petter Bae (2025). Fakespeak in the age of LLMs: Persuasion in AI-generated versus human-authored propaganda. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne; Poldvere, Nele; Følstad, Asbjørn; Kibisova, Elizaveta; Uddin, Md Zia & Thomas, Aleena [Vis alle 7 forfattere av denne artikkelen] (2025). Interdisciplinary research projects on fake news: Experiences from Fakespeak and NxtGenFake. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne; Poldvere, Nele; Kibisova, Elizaveta; Følstad, Asbjørn; Uddin, Md Zia & Thomas, Aleena [Vis alle 7 forfattere av denne artikkelen] (2025). Falske nyheter - reelle trusler: Falske nyheter og (andre former for) desinformasjon i de store språkmodellenes tidsalder. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2025). Forskere roper varsko om russisk KI-påvirkning: - Kan få store konsekvenser. [Journal]. Internett. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne; Poldvere, Nele; Kibisova, Elizaveta; Følstad, Asbjørn; Thomas, Aleena & Uddin, Md Zia [Vis alle 7 forfattere av denne artikkelen] (2025). Falske nyheter - reelle trusler: Resultater og erfaringer fra Fakespeak og NxtGenFake. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2025). KI og desinformasjon: Falske nyheter og bilder. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne; Poldvere, Nele; Brandtzæg, Petter Bae & Følstad, Asbjørn (2025). Trust in the digital society: Perspectives from linguistics-driven interdisciplinary research projects. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Eckhoff, Hanne Martine & Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2025). Adnominal Possessive Constructions. I Greenberg, Mark L. (Red.), Encyclopedia of Slavic Languages and Linguistics Online. Brill. doi: 10.1163/2589-6229_eslo_com_032400. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Thomas, Aleena & Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2025). Methodology for Developing a Fact-Checked News Dataset in Norwegian Bokmål for Fake News Detection (The Fakespeak-NOR Corpus). Impulses and Approaches to Computer-Mediated Communication: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Computer-Mediated Communication and Social Media Corpora for the Humanities. s. 122–122. doi: 10.15495/EPUB_UBT_00008705. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  This work presents the methodology for constructing a novel dataset of fact-checked news articles in Norwegian bokmål, a language with relatively limited publicly available resources for natural language processing. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first dataset of its kind that combines the text of the news article and its veracity label. The source of the data is Faktisk.no, the only Norwegian fact-checking organization. Each of their fact-checks is published with detailed assessment of a claim, including a link to the original article in which the claim first appeared along with a verdict (5 categories from completely true, partially true, not sure, partially false and completely false) and a justification based on factual evidence. The dataset creation process involves several filtering steps. Firstly, all the links to the articles with the original claim were validated. Articles that had been deleted, often due to the claim being flagged as false, were excluded. Non textual content, such as video and audio, were identified using keywords in the URL of the link and removed. Articles that were behind hard paywalls were also removed. From the initial pool of 423 articles, approximately 200 valid instances were retained. Each article was manually reviewed to ensure that the claim being assessed was still present in the current version of the source article. A key challenge in compiling such datasets is that false claims are frequently deleted or edited after being fact-checked, resulting in many articles being unusable. The final dataset includes, for each instance, the claim under evaluation, the corresponding article text, its title, and its veracity label. This collection is intended to support future research on the language of fake news as well as mis- and disinformation detection in low-resource languages.

• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2025). Fra Fakespeak til NxtGenFake. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2025). Fakespeak og NxtGenFake: Fra idé til finansiering og gjennomføring. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2025). Forskningspraksis innen slaviske og østeuropeiske studier: Perspektiver fra Fakespeak og NxtGenFake. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2025). From FAKESPEAK to NxtGenFake: Background, highlights, and the way forward. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2025). Fra FAKESPEAK til NxtGenFake: Bakgrunn, høydepunkter og veien videre. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne & Følstad, Asbjørn (2025). Kommunikasjonens mørke side: Fra FAKESPEAK til NxtGenFake. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne & Følstad, Asbjørn (2025). Kommunikasjonens mørke side: Fra FAKESPEAK (språket i falske nyheter) til NxtGenFake (KI-generert desinformasjon). Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2025). The dark side of communication: From FAKESPEAK to NxtGenFake. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2025). How to develop successful project proposals: Implementation. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2025). Unge sliter mer enn eldre med å skille mellom sant og usant. [Internet]. forskning.no. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2025). Deception in communication: Perspectives from research projects on the language of fake news (Fakespeak) and AI-generated disinformation (NxtGenFake). Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2024). Russland fra et språkvitenskapelig perspektiv: Fakespeak og veien videre. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2024). The Fakespeak project - linguistics in the service of fake news detection: Rationale, where we are now, and the way forward. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2024). Russian disinformation in Norway: Perspectives from the Fakespeak and NxtGenFake projects. [Radio]. Polen. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Poldvere, Nele; Kibisova, Elizaveta; Alvestad, Silje Susanne & Følstad, Asbjørn (2024). The Fakespeak project: Background, results and the way forward. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne & Følstad, Asbjørn (2024). Fakespeak møter Medietilsynet: Fakespeak og veien videre. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Poldvere, Nele; Trnavac, Radoslava & Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2024). A Fakespeak sub-project: Persuasion techniques in English propaganda texts. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Kibisova, Elizaveta & Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2024). Fake news and propaganda in Russian online news: a case study of social media articles. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Fake news is an emerging topic in forensic linguistics within the area of deception and fraud detection. In our research project, we take a corpus linguistics approach to finding grammatical and stylistic features of the language of fake news in English, Norwegian, and Russian. As part of the project, we have collected corpora of Russian social media-based news articles of varying veracity. The levels of (non-)veracity, ranging from false to genuine news, are established and labelled by independent professional fact-checkers. In this study, we investigate propaganda techniques in Russian news reports on social media following Tandoc et al. (2018) in defining propaganda as a subcategory of fake news. References Tandoc Jr., Edson Castro & Lim, Zheng Wei & Ling, Richard (2018) Defining “Fake News”: A typology of scholarly definitions. Digital Journalism, 6:2, 137-153. 10.1080/21670811.2017.1360143 Da San Martino, Giovanni & Yu, Seunghak & Barrón-Cedeño, Alberto & Petrov, Rostislav & Nakov, Preslav. (2019). Fine-Grained Analysis of Propaganda in News Article. 5640-5650. 10.18653/v1/D19-1565. The aims of the study are to investigate and describe the linguistic representation of manipulation techniques in news articles in Russian that can be categorised as propaganda. To achieve this goal, we adapt and apply Da San Martino et al.’s (2019) framework for propaganda detection and annotation in English to a Russian subcorpus that includes news entries labelled as half-true, mostly true, or partially true. By annotating instances of propaganda techniques used within an article, we detect the prevalent techniques, their possible combinations within one article, and the specific linguistic strategies that are used to convey these techniques. Preliminarily, we find that the most prevalent techniques are attack on reputation, manipulative language, such as irony, and justifications (appeal to values).

• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2024). The Fakespeak project - linguistics in the service of fake news detection: Rationale, where we are now, and the way forward. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2024). Fakespeak - the language of fake news. Fake news detection based on linguistic cues. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Trnavac, Radoslava; Poldvere, Nele & Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2024). The language of persuasion in fake news. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Propaganda, misinformation and fake news have the potential to polarize public opinion, to promote hate speech and to reduce trust in the democratic process. The aim of this paper is to investigate persuasion techniques in English, focusing specifically on their underlying taxonomy and the linguistic resources employed to express propaganda in fake news. Current research on persuasion focuses primarily on the language of politics, advertising, public relations and advocacy (Partington and Taylor, 2018; Graeme, 2005; Cutlip and Centre, 1978), while computational studies deal with the automatic detection of persuasion in news articles (Barron-Cedeno et al., 2019; Da San Martino et al., 2019). However, linguistic studies so far have not addressed the use of specific linguistic means which reflect persuasion and propaganda strategies in fake news. To pursue this goal, we apply a modified version of the framework developed by Da San Martino et al. (2019) and manually annotate our corpus of fake news. The data consist of 20,000 words of news articles and blog posts, and 5,000 words of social media posts. They all have been labeled by fact-checkers at PolitiFact as Half True or as being mainly based on facts but biased towards a particular viewpoint, in line with Tandoc et al.’s (2018) definition of propaganda. We devote special attention to the annotation of the units that carry persuasion effects since this has not been a subject of extensive linguistic research. The preliminary analysis shows that the techniques which refer to attack on reputation, calls for action and loaded language are the most prominent strategies. The dominant linguistic strategies are various grammatical, lexical and textual evaluations together with binary oppositions and false parallels, used to convince the reader of the truthfulness of what is presented. References Barron-Cedeno, Alberto Jaradat, Israa, Da San Martino, Giovanni and Preslav Nakov. 2019. Proppy: Organizing the news based on their propagandistic content. Information Processing & Management 56(5):1849–1864. Cutlip, Scott and Allen Centre. 1978. Effective public relations. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall Publishers. Da San Martino, Giovanni, Barron-Cedeno, Alberto , Wachsmuth, Henning, Petrov, Rostislav and Preslav Nakov. 2020. Semeval-2020 task 11: Detection of propaganda techniques in news articles. In Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Semantic Evaluation, SemEval@COLING 2020, Barcelona (online), December 12-13, 2020, edited by A. Herbelot, X. Zhu, A. Palmer, N. Schneider, J. May, and E. Shutova, 1377–1414. International Committee for Computational Linguistics. Graeme, Burton. 2005. Media and society: Critical perspectives. Berkshire: Open University Press. Partington, Alan and Charlotte Tylor. 2018. The Language of Persuasion in Politics. London: Routledge. Tandoc Jr, Edson C., Lim, Zheng Wei and Richard Lim. 2018. Defining “fake news”: A typology of scholarly definitions. Digital Journalism 6(2): 137–153.

• Følstad, Asbjørn & Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2024). Fakespeak, NxtGenFake og KI-RISK. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Poldvere, Nele; Kibisova, Elizaveta; Trnavac, Radoslava & Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2024). Is stance in fake news expressed differently across languages? Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  In this corpus study, we examine the use and distribution of stance expressions in fake news in three languages: English, Norwegian and Russian. Stance is a major communicative resource in language, and it plays an important role in how news organisations and social media users inform, persuade and entertain their audiences. Stance may also be an indicator of the ‘fakeness’ of news. Indeed, previous research (Trnavac & Põldvere, 2024) has identified significant differences in evaluative language use between fake and genuine news in English; however, it is unclear how these differences are reflected across languages and cultures. Therefore, the present study sets out to compare and contrast the occurrence of a range of lexico-grammatical features of stance across English in the US, Norwegian in Norway and Russian in Russia, based on Biber (2006). The lexico-grammatical features are divided into major structural and pragmatic categories (e.g., adverbs expressing epistemic stance: certainly). The data are from three comparable corpora, collected from fact-checking websites covering news in the respective languages. Based on previous cross-linguistic research on stance in news discourse (Marin-Arrese, 2015), we expect there to be considerable differences across the three languages due to general differences in argumentative and persuasive style, as well as specific cultural characteristics associated with each country (e.g., varying levels of freedom of expression). References Biber, D. (2006) Stance in spoken and written university registers. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 5, 97–116. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2006.05.001 Marin-Arrese, J. I. (2015). Epistemicity and stance: A cross-linguistic study of epistemic stance strategies in journalistic discourse in English and Spanish. Discourse Studies, 17(2), 210–225. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445614564523 Trnavac, R., & Põldvere, N. (2024). Investigating Appraisal and the language of evaluation in fake news corpora. Corpus Pragmatics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41701-023-00162-x

• Poldvere, Nele; Kibisova, Elizaveta & Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2024). Fakespeak (linguistics). Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne; Følstad, Asbjørn & Uddin, Zia (2023). The Fakespeak project: Perspectives from linguistics and computer science. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2023). The Fakespeak project: What it is, who we are and what we have found so far. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2023). The Fakespeak project: Linguistics in the service of national security. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Poldvere, Nele; Kibisova, Elizaveta & Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2023). Stance, fake news and corpora: A contrastive study of English, Norwegian and Russian. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  In this work-in-progress presentation, we outline the main aims and steps of implementation of a corpus-based analysis of stance in fake news in English, Norwegian and Russian. In our previous study, we found significant differences in Appraisal expressions between fake and genuine news in English (Trnavac & Põldvere, 2023), but it is unclear how these differences are reflected across languages and cultures. Based on Biber’s (2006) stance framework, we set out to compare and contrast the use and distribution of a wide range of lexico-grammatical features of stance across English in the US, Norwegian in Norway and Russian in Russia. To the best of our knowledge, the framework has not been applied to fake news research before, nor are we aware of any extensions of the framework to Norwegian and Russian to facilitate cross-linguistic comparisons. The data are from three corpora of fake and genuine news, collected from fact-checking websites covering news in the respective languages. In this presentation, we focus on and seek feedback on the first steps of the analysis: (i) the development of the stance frameworks in all three languages and (ii) the design and compilation of comparable corpora in terms of size and genre. We also present the outputs of preliminary semi-automatic searches of the stance expressions in the corpora, which give interesting first insights into how stance-taking works in fake news in English, Norwegian and Russian. References Biber, D. (2006). Stance in spoken and written university registers. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 5, 97–116. Trnavac, R., & Põldvere, N. (2023). Investigating Appraisal and the language of evaluation in fake news corpora [Manuscript under review].

• Poldvere, Nele; Kibisova, Elizaveta; Alvestad, Silje Susanne & Trnavac, Radoslava (2023). Fake news around the world: A corpus-based analysis of stance in fake news in English, Norwegian and Russian. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  This talk presents a corpus-based analysis of stance in fake news in English, Norwegian and Russian. In our previous research, we found significant differences in Appraisal expressions between fake and genuine news in English (Trnavac & Põldvere, 2023), but it is unclear how these differences are reflected across languages and cultures. Based on Biber’s (2006) stance framework, we set out to compare and contrast the use and distribution of a wide range of lexico-grammatical features of stance across English in the US, Norwegian in Norway and Russian in Russia. The lexico-grammatical features are divided into major structural categories with meanings related to epistemic stance, evidentiality, attitude, and more (e.g., I believe, evidently, it is surprising that, and equivalent constructions in other languages). To the best of our knowledge, the stance framework has not been used in fake news research before, nor are we aware of any extensions of the framework to Norwegian and Russian to facilitate cross-linguistic comparisons. The data are from three comparable corpora of fake and genuine news, collected from fact-checking websites covering news in the respective languages. For Russian, for example, we relied on websites operating in countries neighbouring Russia, taking into account the recent implementation of laws in Russia which have considerably limited freedom of expression in the country. The corpora are comparable in terms of size and the fact that the fake news stories are mainly from news websites, blogs and social media posts. Based on previous cross-linguistic research on stance in news discourse (Marin-Arrese, 2015), we expect there to be considerable differences in the way in which stance is expressed in fake news in the three languages due to general differences in argumentative and persuasive style, as well as specific cultural characteristics associated with each country (e.g., high levels of state propaganda in Russia). References Biber, D. (2006). Stance in spoken and written university registers. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 5, 97–116. Marin-Arrese, J. I. (2015). Epistemicity and stance: A cross-linguistic study of epistemic stance strategies in journalistic discourse in English and Spanish. Discourse Studies, 17(2), 210–225. Trnavac, R., & Põldvere, N. (2023). Investigating Appraisal and the language of evaluation in fake news corpora [Manuscript in preparation].

• Põldvere, Nele & Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2021). Fakespeak – A pilot study. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  In this talk, I present the results of a pilot study within the research project “Fakespeak: The language of fake news”. The project involves linguists and computer scientists whose primary objective is to reveal the grammatical and stylistic features of the language of fake news, Fakespeak. The secondary objective is to improve existing fake news detection systems through the automation of the defining linguistic features of Fakespeak. Fake news is defined here as news items that are meant to be deceptive and in which case the author knows that they are false. The pilot study is inspired by a study conducted by Woodfield and Grieve (2019) on Jayson Blair, who was found fabricating news stories for The New York Times. The newspaper tagged the fabricated stories, resulting in two datasets, one of genuine and one of fabricated stories. The linguists subjected the two datasets to Register Analysis, hypothesising that, given the distinct communicative purposes of the stories—to deceive versus to inform—the genuine and the fabricated stories should be grammatically distinct. Indeed, they found that the features of Blair’s genuine stories were similar to those of informationally dense writing, whereas the features of his false stories were similar to those of interactive discourse. I will use the Jayson Blair corpus to extend the analysis to include socio-cognitive features of language, namely metaphor. Based on previous findings that metaphor is limited in interactive spoken discourse (Cameron, 2003), I expect fake news to make use of metaphor to a lesser extent than genuine news, thus providing support for Woodfield and Grieve’s (2019) study. References Cameron, L. (2003). Metaphor in educational discourse. Continuum. Woodfield, H., & Grieve, J. (2019, August 29). Individual differences in fake news: The case of Jayson Blair [Conference session]. British Association of Applied Linguistics Annual Conference, Manchester, UK.

• Põldvere, Nele & Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2021). Is metaphor the key to detecting fake news? First results from the Fakespeak project. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  This study presents the first results from Fakespeak, a project which defines the linguistic features of fake news in order to improve currently existing detection systems. We explore the possibility that the key to distinguishing between fake and genuine news is metaphor, a resource for talking about one thing (usually complex and abstract) in terms of another (simple and concrete). For instance, talking about viruses as coming in waves reflects the conceptual metaphor disease is a natural disaster, where disease is the ‘target’ domain and natural disaster the ‘source’ domain (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Previous research has suggested that metaphor is often used to describe personal experiences, which leads us to believe that genuine news makes use of metaphor to a greater extent than fake news. Moreover, we expect there to be differences in the source domains used. In order to evade issues of comparability, the data are from news written by a single journalist, Jayson Blair, who was caught fabricating stories for The New York Times in the early 2000s (Woodfield & Grieve, 2019). The dataset consists of 38 redacted and 47 non-redacted articles, which were read in full in order to identify the full range of metaphorical expressions. The preliminary results provide support for the expectation that metaphor is more limited in fake news. Moreover, the source domains used in fake news reflect very basic bodily experiences of the world, compared to the diverse range of complex and vivid metaphors used in genuine news (e.g., nature, war, sports). References Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. The University of Chicago Press. Woodfield, H., & Grieve, J. (2019, August 29). Individual differences in fake news: The case of Jayson Blair [Conference session]. British Association of Applied Linguistics Annual Conference, Manchester, UK.

• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2021). Fakespeak - the language of fake news. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2021). The Fakespeak project: Linguistics in the service of fake news detection. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2020). The Fakespeak Project. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2020). Fakespeak - the language of fake news. Fake news detection based on linguistic cues. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2020). Norwegian Fakespeak - A Pilot Study. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2020). - Beware of fakes! Detecting fake online contents based on linguistic cues. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2019). Fakespeak - the language of fake news. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2019). Linguistics in the service of fake news detection. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2019). Fakespeak: The language of fake news. Fake news detection based on linguistic cues. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2018). O. Nova 546: The Uppsala Manuscript of Maḳbūl-i ʿārif (1631). I Edzard, Lutz; Borgland, Jens Wilhelm & Hüsken, Ute (Red.), Reading Slowly. A Festschrift for Jens E. Braarvig. Harrassowitz Verlag. ISSN 9783447109642. s. 13–27. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  This article is a short synopsis of parts of my monograph, Alvestad (2016), about the Uppsala manuscript, O. nova 546, of Muḥammed Hevāʾī Üskūfī Bosnevī´s literary work Maḳbūl-i ʿārif [Dear to the Wise] from 1631. Thus, in this article I first outline the motivation behind my monograph. Subsequently I present in more detail the author of Maḳbūl-i ʿārif—namely, Muḥammed Hevāʾī Üskūfī Bosnevī, before I turn to the work itself and the extant manuscripts thereof. Next I briefly outline some methodological issues before I provide a taste of some of the parts of Maḳbūl-i ʿārif. The final section is devoted to a summary and further outlook.

• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2016). Das literarische Werk Maḳbūl-i ʿārif [„Dem Weisen lieb“] von Muḥammed Hevāʾī Üskūfī Bosnevī (1631). Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2016). Multilingualism and translation in Ottoman Bosnia and Herzegovina: The versified (Ottoman) Turkish-Bosnian glossary Maḳbūl-i ʿārif [Dear to the Wise] from 1631 as a case in point. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2016). A corpus-based case study of aspect use in infinitives in Russian as compared with infinitives and corresponding da-constructions in some Balkan languages. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2016). The use of aspect in Slavic imperatives. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2016). Aspect use in Slavic infinitives and corresponding da-constructions. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2016). Der Aspektgebrauch im slawischen Imperativ. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2016). Aspect in Slavic infinitives and corresponding constructions. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne; Saric, Ljiljana; Hauge, Kjetil Rå & Lazarova, Anna (2015). The particle "de" in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, Bulgarian, Modern Greek, and Turkish. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2015). A DRT Account of Event Type Anaphora in Slavic Imperatives: Cases with a Covert Antecedent. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2015). Aspect in the Slavic infintive (and subjunctive). Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2015). Aspect use in the Slavic infinitive (and subjunctive). Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2015). A DRT account of event type anaphora in Slavic imperatives: Cases with and without an overt antecedent. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2015). The typology of aspect in the Slavic imperative. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2015). Aspect and tense in the Slavic infinitive (and subjunctive): Interpretation and distribution. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2015). The functional diversity of Slavic imperatives. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne & Edzard, Lutz (2014). Aspect in the Slavic and the Biblical Hebrew imperative. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Alvestad, Silje Susanne (2014). Muḥammed Hevāʾī Üskūfī Bosnevī and the Uppsala manuscript of Maḳbūl-i ʿārif from a turcological perspective. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv

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