Consumers increasingly rate, review and research products online. Consequently, websites containing consumer reviews are becoming targets of opinion spam. While recent work has focused primarily on manually identifiable instances of opinion spam, in this work we study deceptive opinion spam---fictitious opinions that have been deliberately written to sound authentic. Integrating work from psychology and computational linguistics, we develop and compare three approaches to detecting deceptive opinion spam, and ultimately develop a classifier that is nearly 90 accurate on our gold-standard opinion spam dataset. Based on feature analysis of our learned models, we additionally make several theoretical contributions, including revealing a relationship between deceptive opinions and imaginative writing.
Research has also been conducted on the related task of psycholinguistic deception detection . , and later Mihalcea and Strapparava , ask participants to give both their true and untrue views on personal issues (e.g., their stance on the death penalty). consider computer-mediated deception in role-playing games designed to be played over instant messaging and e-mail. However, while these studies compare @math -gram--based deception classifiers to a random guess baseline of 50 Lastly, automatic approaches to determining review quality have been studied---directly @cite_36 , and in the contexts of helpfulness @cite_6 @cite_37 @cite_35 and credibility @cite_14 . Unfortunately, most measures of quality employed in those works are based exclusively on human judgments, which we find in to be poorly calibrated to detecting deceptive opinion spam.
@cite_35 @cite_37 @cite_14 @cite_36 @cite_6
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User-generated reviews are a common and valuable source of product information, yet little attention has been paid as to how best to present them to end-users. In this paper, we describe a classification-based recommender system that is designed to recommend the most helpful reviews for a given product. We present a large-scale evaluation of our approach using TripAdvisor hotel reviews, and we show that our approach is capable of suggesting superior reviews compared to a number of alternative recommendation benchmarks. User-supplied reviews are widely and increasingly used to enhance e-commerce and other websites. Because reviews can be numerous and varying in quality, it is important to assess how helpful each review is. While review helpfulness is currently assessed manually, in this paper we consider the task of automatically assessing it. Experiments using SVM regression on a variety of features over Amazon.com product reviews show promising results, with rank correlations of up to 0.66. We found that the most useful features include the length of the review, its unigrams, and its product rating. Assessing the quality of user generated content is an important problem for many web forums. While quality is currently assessed manually, we propose an algorithm to assess the quality of forum posts automatically and test it on data provided by Nabble.com. We use state-of-the-art classification techniques and experiment with five feature classes: Surface, Lexical, Syntactic, Forum specific and Similarity features. We achieve an accuracy of 89 on the task of automatically assessing post quality in the software domain using forum specific features. Without forum specific features, we achieve an accuracy of 82 . There are many on-line settings in which users publicly express opinions. A number of these offer mechanisms for other users to evaluate these opinions; a canonical example is Amazon.com, where reviews come with annotations like "26 of 32 people found the following review helpful." Opinion evaluation appears in many off-line settings as well, including market research and political campaigns. Reasoning about the evaluation of an opinion is fundamentally different from reasoning about the opinion itself: rather than asking, "What did Y think of X?", we are asking, "What did Z think of Y's opinion of X?" Here we develop a framework for analyzing and modeling opinion evaluation, using a large-scale collection of Amazon book reviews as a dataset. We find that the perceived helpfulness of a review depends not just on its content but also but also in subtle ways on how the expressed evaluation relates to other evaluations of the same product. As part of our approach, we develop novel methods that take advantage of the phenomenon of review "plagiarism" to control for the effects of text in opinion evaluation, and we provide a simple and natural mathematical model consistent with our findings. Our analysis also allows us to distinguish among the predictions of competing theories from sociology and social psychology, and to discover unexpected differences in the collective opinion-evaluation behavior of user populations from different countries.