Keystroke Patterns as Prosody in Digital Writings: A Case Study with Deceptive Reviews and Essays

Ritwik Banerjee, Song Feng, Jun Seok Kang, Yejin Choi

Abstract: In this paper, we explore the use of keyboard strokes as a means to access the real-time writing process of online authors, analogously to prosody in speech analysis, in the context of deception detection. We show that differences in keystroke patterns like editing maneuvers and duration of pauses can help distinguish between truthful and deceptive writing. Empirical results show that incorporating keystrokebased features lead to improved performance in deception detection in two different domains: online reviews and essays.