The comparison revealed that people who are lying are less likely to use personal pronouns - such as "I", "me", "mine" - and tend to use more adjectives, such as "brilliant" and "sublime". Reasons for this language use could be that liars try to dissociate themselves from the content of a message, while clouding its meaning in unnecessary description.

Other clues that someone is lying include linking sentences to each other so that thoughts appear to be connected, and mirroring the sentence structure of the person they're communicating with.

The algorithm is better at detecting lies than the average human. People manage to spot a lie 54 per cent of the time, according to the researchers, whereas the computer lie detector detects it 70 per cent of the time.

"Humans are startlingly bad at consciously detecting deception," said Tom van Laer, one of the researchers who specialises in marketing at the Cass Business School, City University London.