Presentation of Research on Syntactic Complexity at the SyntaxFest 2025 Conference in Ljubljana

From August 26–29, 2025, the international linguistics conference SyntaxFest 2025 took place in Ljubljana. The project Biography of Fake News with a Touch of AI was represented by Xinying Chen and Miroslav Kubát. Their presentation “Syntactic Complexity and News Credibility in Czech Media” was presented as part of Research Work Package No. 1 Disinformation texts from the perspective of 21^st-century linguistics.

The study draws on a corpus of more than 7,000 Czech newspaper articles from 2016–2022, categorized by their degree of credibility. The analysis showed that manipulative and misleading texts exhibit higher syntactic complexity (for example, longer sentences and more intricate dependency structures) than credible articles. By contrast, credible texts are characterized by longer clauses and a more uniform style overall. These differences suggest that quantitative linguistic methods can be useful in detecting disinformation strategies in the media.

Participation in SyntaxFest provided an opportunity to share the research results and discuss them in an international context. The conference was attended by 134 researchers from 34 different countries.

Updated: 09. 09. 2025