Semantics of Subterfuge: Benchmarking Legal Deception Detection Against General-domain State-of-the-Art
Primary research
#1209
- Canonical URL
- http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.29066v1
- Topic
- unassigned (set during synthesis)
- First seen
- 2026-08-03 07:15:55
- Last seen
- 2026-08-03 07:15:55
Source raw items (1)
- arXiv2026-08-03 07:15:21Semantics of Subterfuge: Benchmarking Legal Deception Detection Against General-domain State-of-the-Art
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.