Abstract The impact of online reviews on businesses has grown significantly during last years, being crucial to determine business success in a wide array of sectors, ranging from restaurants, hotels to e-commerce. Unfortunately, some users use unethical means to improve their online reputation by writing fake reviews of their businesses or competitors. Previous research has addressed fake review detection in a number of domains, such as product or business reviews in restaurants and hotels. However, in spite of its economical interest, the domain of consumer electronics businesses has not yet been thoroughly studied. This article proposes a feature framework for detecting fake reviews that has been evaluated in the consumer electronics domain. The contributions are fourfold: (i) Construction of a dataset for classifying fake reviews in the consumer electronics domain in four different cities based on scraping techniques; (ii) definition of a feature framework for fake review detection; (iii) development of a fake review classification method based on the proposed framework and (iv) evaluation and analysis of the results for each of the cities under study. We have reached an 82 F-Score on the classification task and the Ada Boost classifier has been proven to be the best one by statistical means according to the Friedman test.
Behavioral features refer to nonverbal characteristics of review activity, such as the number of reviews or the time and device where the review was posted. They were used in order to improve the classification model resulting in encouraging results. @cite_50 introduced behavioral features on Amazon reviews, distinguising among review features (e.g. number of feedbacks, position of the review, textual features, rating features, etc.), product features (e.g. price, sales rank) and reviewer features (e.g. average rating, ratio of the number of reviews that the reviewer wrote which were the first reviews, etc.). In another work, @cite_38 explore the effect of both textual and behavioural features in the restaurant and hotel domain, showing that non-textual features result more relevant for the task of fake review detection. Also, regarding the restaurant domain, some interesting findings were described by @cite_47 . Restaurants are more likely to make review fraud when they have a lower reputation, including having few reviewers or bad scorings.
@cite_38 @cite_47 @cite_50
2554367394 1804563568 2047756776
AbstractThe value and credibility of online consumer reviews are compromised by significantly increasing yet difficult-to-identify fake reviews. Extant models for automated online fake review detection rely heavily on verbal behaviors of reviewers while largely ignoring their nonverbal behaviors. This research identifies a variety of nonverbal behavioral features of online reviewers and examines their relative importance for the detection of fake reviews in comparison to that of verbal behavioral features. The results of an empirical evaluation using real-world online reviews reveal that incorporating nonverbal features of reviewers can significantly improve the performance of online fake review detection models. Moreover, compared with verbal features, nonverbal features of reviewers are shown to be more important for fake review detection. Furthermore, model pruning based on a sensitivity analysis improves the parsimony of the developed fake review detection model without sacrificing its performance. Consumer reviews are now part of everyday decision-making. Yet, the credibility of these reviews is fundamentally undermined when businesses commit review fraud, creating fake reviews for themselves or their competitors. We investigate the economic incentives to commit review fraud on the popular review platform Yelp, using two complementary approaches and datasets. We begin by analyzing restaurant reviews that are identified by Yelp's filtering algorithm as suspicious, or fake ? and treat these as a proxy for review fraud (an assumption we provide evidence for). We present four main findings. First, roughly 16 of restaurant reviews on Yelp are filtered. These reviews tend to be more extreme (favorable or unfavorable) than other reviews, and the prevalence of suspicious reviews has grown significantly over time. Second, a restaurant is more likely to commit review fraud when its reputation is weak, i.e., when it has few reviews, or it has recently received bad reviews. Third, chain restaurants ? which benefit less from Yelp ? are also less likely to commit review fraud. Fourth, when restaurants face increased competition, they become more likely to receive unfavorable fake reviews. Using a separate dataset, we analyze businesses that were caught soliciting fake reviews through a sting conducted by Yelp. These data support our main results, and shed further light on the economic incentives behind a business's decision to leave fake reviews. Evaluative texts on the Web have become a valuable source of opinions on products, services, events, individuals, etc. Recently, many researchers have studied such opinion sources as product reviews, forum posts, and blogs. However, existing research has been focused on classification and summarization of opinions using natural language processing and data mining techniques. An important issue that has been neglected so far is opinion spam or trustworthiness of online opinions. In this paper, we study this issue in the context of product reviews, which are opinion rich and are widely used by consumers and product manufacturers. In the past two years, several startup companies also appeared which aggregate opinions from product reviews. It is thus high time to study spam in reviews. To the best of our knowledge, there is still no published study on this topic, although Web spam and email spam have been investigated extensively. We will see that opinion spam is quite different from Web 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 opinion spam in reviews is widespread. This paper analyzes such spam activities and presents some novel techniques to detect them