Seminar Users in the Arabic Twitter Sphere

We introduce the notion of "seminar users", who are social media users engaged in propaganda in support of a political entity. We develop a framework that can identify such users with 84.4% precision and 76.1% recall. While our dataset is from the Arab region, omitting language-specific features has only a minor impact on classification performance, and thus, our approach could work for detecting seminar users in other parts of the world and in other languages. We further explored a controversial political topic to observe the prevalence and potential potency of such users. In our case study, we found that 25% of the users engaged in the topic are in fact seminar users and their tweets make nearly a third of the on-topic tweets. Moreover, they are often successful in affecting mainstream discourse with coordinated hashtag campaigns.Comment: to appear in SocInfo 201

Detecting Deceptive Opinions: Intra and Cross-domain Classification using an Efficient Representation

Electronic versíon of an article published as International Journal of Uncertainty Fuzziness and Knowledge-Based Systems, 25, 2, 2017, 151-174. DOI:10.1142/S0218488517400165 © copyright World Scientific Publishing Company. https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscinet/ijufks[EN] Online opinions play an important role for customers and companies because of the increasing use they do to make purchase and business decisions. A consequence of that is the growing tendency to post fake reviews in order to change purchase decisions and opinions about products and services. Therefore, it is really important to filter out deceptive comments from the retrieved opinions. In this paper we propose the character n-grams in tokens, an efficient and effective variant of the traditional character n-grams model, which we use to obtain a low dimensionality representation of opinions. A Support Vector Machines classifier was used to evaluate our proposal on available corpora with reviews of hotels, doctors and restaurants. In order to study the performance of our model, we make experiments with intra and cross-domain cases. The aim of the latter experiment is to evaluate our approach in a realistic cross-domain scenario where deceptive opinions are available in a domain but not in another one. After comparing our method with state-of-the-art ones we may conclude that using character n-grams in tokens allows to obtain competitive results with a low dimensionality representation.This publication was made possible by NPRP grant #9-175-1-033 from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of Qatar Foundation). The statements made herein are solely the responsibility of the authors.Cagnina, L.; Rosso, P. (2017). Detecting Deceptive Opinions: Intra and Cross-domain Classification using an Efficient Representation. International Journal of Uncertainty Fuzziness and Knowledge-Based Systems. 25(2):151-174. https://doi.org/10.1142/S0218488517400165S151174252Cambria, E. (2016). Affective Computing and Sentiment Analysis. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 31(2), 102-107. doi:10.1109/mis.2016.31Cambria, E., & Hussain, A. (2015). Sentic Computing. Cognitive Computation, 7(2), 183-185. doi:10.1007/s12559-015-9325-0Hall, M., Frank, E., Holmes, G., Pfahringer, B., Reutemann, P., & Witten, I. H. (2009). The WEKA data mining software. ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter, 11(1), 10-18. doi:10.1145/1656274.1656278Hancock, J. T., Curry, L. E., Goorha, S., & Woodworth, M. (2007). On Lying and Being Lied To: A Linguistic Analysis of Deception in Computer-Mediated Communication. Discourse Processes, 45(1), 1-23. doi:10.1080/01638530701739181Hernández Fusilier, D., Montes-y-Gómez, M., Rosso, P., & Guzmán Cabrera, R. (2015). Detecting positive and negative deceptive opinions using PU-learning. Information Processing & Management, 51(4), 433-443. doi:10.1016/j.ipm.2014.11.001Mann, H. B., & Whitney, D. R. (1947). On a Test of Whether one of Two Random Variables is Stochastically Larger than the Other. The Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 18(1), 50-60. doi:10.1214/aoms/1177730491MONTAÑÉS, E., QUEVEDO, J. R., COMBARRO, E. F., DÍAZ, I., & RANILLA, J. (2007). A HYBRID FEATURE SELECTION METHOD FOR TEXT CATEGORIZATION. International Journal of Uncertainty, Fuzziness and Knowledge-Based Systems, 15(02), 133-151. doi:10.1142/s0218488507004492Newman, M. L., Pennebaker, J. W., Berry, D. S., & Richards, J. M. (2003). Lying Words: Predicting Deception from Linguistic Styles. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 29(5), 665-675. doi:10.1177/0146167203029005010Raudys, S. J., & Jain, A. K. (1991). Small sample size effects in statistical pattern recognition: recommendations for practitioners. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 13(3), 252-264. doi:10.1109/34.75512Wang, G., Xie, S., Liu, B., & Yu, P. S. (2012). Identify Online Store Review Spammers via Social Review Graph. ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, 3(4), 1-21. doi:10.1145/2337542.2337546Webb, G. I. (2000). Machine Learning, 40(2), 159-196. doi:10.1023/a:100765951484

A Multilingual Spam Reviews Detection Based on Pre-Trained Word Embedding and Weighted Swarm Support Vector Machines

Online reviews are important information that customers seek when deciding to buy products or services. Also, organizations benefit from these reviews as essential feedback for their products or services. Such information required reliability, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic which showed a massive increase in online reviews due to quarantine and sitting at home. Not only the number of reviews was boosted but also the context and preferences during the pandemic. Therefore, spam reviewers reflect on these changes and improve their deception technique. Spam reviews usually consist of misleading, fake, or fraudulent reviews that tend to deceive customers for the purpose of making money or causing harm to other competitors. Hence, this work presents a Weighted Support Vector Machine (WSVM) and Harris Hawks Optimization (HHO) for spam review detection. The HHO works as an algorithm for optimizing hyperparameters and feature weighting. Three different language corpora have been used as datasets, namely English, Spanish, and Arabic in order to solve the multilingual problem in spam reviews. Moreover, pre-trained word embedding (BERT) has been applied alongside three-word representation methods (NGram-3, TFIDF, and One-hot encoding). Four experiments have been conducted, each focused on solving and demonstrating different aspects. In all experiments, the proposed approach showed excellent results compared with other state-ofthe- art algorithms. In other words, the WSVM-HHO achieved an accuracy of 88.163%, 71.913%, 89.565%, and 84.270%, for English, Spanish, Arabic, and Multilingual datasets, respectively. Further, a deep analysis has been conducted to investigate the context of reviews before and after the COVID-19 situation. In addition, it has been generated to create a new dataset with statistical features and merge its previous textual features for improving detection performance.Projects TED2021-129938B-I0,PID2020-113462RB-I00, PDC2022-133900-I00PID2020-115570GB-C22, granted by Ministerio Español de Ciencia e InnovaciónMCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033MCIN/AEINext GenerationEU/PRT

A survey on author profiling, deception, and irony detection for the Arabic language

"This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: [FULL CITE], which has been published in final form at [Link to final article using the DOI]. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving."[EN] The possibility of knowing people traits on the basis of what they write is a field of growing interest named author profiling. To infer a user's gender, age, native language, language variety, or even when the user lies, simply by analyzing her texts, opens a wide range of possibilities from the point of view of security. In this paper, we review the state of the art about some of the main author profiling problems, as well as deception and irony detection, especially focusing on the Arabic language.Qatar National Research Fund, Grant/Award Number: NPRP 9-175-1-033Rosso, P.; Rangel-Pardo, FM.; Hernandez-Farias, DI.; Cagnina, L.; Zaghouani, W.; Charfi, A. (2018). 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Online Deception Detection Refueled by Real World Data Collection

The lack of large realistic datasets presents a bottleneck in online deception detection studies. In this paper, we apply a data collection method based on social network analysis to quickly identify high-quality deceptive and truthful online reviews from Amazon. The dataset contains more than 10,000 deceptive reviews and is diverse in product domains and reviewers. Using this dataset, we explore effective general features for online deception detection that perform well across domains. We demonstrate that with generalized features - advertising speak and writing complexity scores - deception detection performance can be further improved by adding additional deceptive reviews from assorted domains in training. Finally, reviewer level evaluation gives an interesting insight into different deceptive reviewers' writing styles.Comment: 10 pages, Accepted to Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP) 201

Deceptive Opinions Detection Using New Proposed Arabic Semantic Features

Some users try to post false reviews to promote or to devalue other’s products and services. This action is known as deceptive opinions spam, where spammers try to gain or to profit from posting untruthful reviews. Therefore, we conducted this work to develop and to implement new semantic features to improve the Arabic deception detection. These features were inspired from the study of discourse parse and the rhetoric relations in Arabic. Looking to the importance of the phrase unit in the Arabic language and the grammatical studies, we have analyzed and selected the most used unit markers and relations to calculate the proposed features. These last were used basically to represent the reviews texts in the classification phase. Thus, the most accurate classification technique used in this area which has been proven by several previous works is the Support Vector Machine classifier (SVM). But there is always a lack concerning the Arabic annotated resources specially for deception detection area as it is considered new research area. Therefore, we used the semi supervised SVM to overcome this problem by using the unlabeled data

Cloud based Framework for Fake Review Detection

Online reviews are one of the significant factors in a customer2019;s purchase decision or to avail of any service. Online reviews give rise to the potential threats that fake reviewers may write a false review to artificially promote a product or defaming value of a service. Using Natural Language Processing, many methods have already been developed to detect fake reviews, especially reviews written in the English language. In this paper, I propose a novel framework where authenticity of a feedback will check through two perspectives. Firstly, the system checks whether the review is fake or not. Secondly, it also checks the authenticity of the reviewer. The outcome result accumulates in cloud storage for providing further business analytics