Product reviews and ratings on e-commerce websites provide customers with detailed insights about various aspects of the product such as quality, usefulness, etc. Since they influence customers' buying decisions, product reviews have become a fertile ground for abuse by sellers (colluding with reviewers) to promote their own products or tarnish the reputation of competitor's products. In this paper, our focus is on detecting such abusive entities (both sellers and reviewers) via a tensor decomposition on the product reviews data. While tensor decomposition is mostly unsupervised, we formulate our problem as a semi-supervised binary multi-target tensor decomposition, to take advantage of currently known abusive entities. We empirically show that our multi-target semi-supervised model achieves higher precision and recall in detecting abusive entities as compared with unsupervised techniques. Finally, we show that our proposed stochastic partial natural gradient inference for our model empirically achieves faster convergence than stochastic gradient and Online-EM with sufficient statistics.
There has been a lot of attention recently to address the issue of finding fake reviewers in online e-commerce platforms. @cite_9 were one of the first to show that review spam exists and proposed simple text based features to classify fake reviewers.
@cite_9
2154058875
Mining of opinions from product reviews, forum posts and blogs is an important research topic with many applications. However, existing research has been focused on extraction, classification and summarization of opinions from these sources. An important issue that has not been studied so far is the opinion spam or the trustworthiness of online opinions. In this paper, we study this issue in the context of product reviews. To our knowledge, there is still no published study on this topic, although Web page spam and email spam have been investigated extensively. We will see that review spam is quite different from Web page spam and email spam, and thus requires different detection techniques. Based on the analysis of 5.8 million reviews and 2.14 million reviewers from amazon.com, we show that review spam is widespread. In this paper, we first present a categorization of spam reviews and then propose several techniques to detect them.