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

Man vs machine – Detecting deception in online reviews

This study focused on three main research objectives: analyzing the methods used to identify deceptive online consumer reviews, evaluating insights provided by multi-method automated approaches based on individual and aggregated review data, and formulating a review interpretation framework for identifying deception. The theoretical framework is based on two critical deception-related models, information manipulation theory and self-presentation theory. The findings confirm the interchangeable characteristics of the various automated text analysis methods in drawing insights about review characteristics and underline their significant complementary aspects. An integrative multi-method model that approaches the data at the individual and aggregate level provides more complex insights regarding the quantity and quality of review information, sentiment, cues about its relevance and contextual information, perceptual aspects, and cognitive material

Exploring the Power of Topic Modeling Techniques in Analyzing Customer Reviews: A Comparative Analysis

The exponential growth of online social network platforms and applications has led to a staggering volume of user-generated textual content, including comments and reviews. Consequently, users often face difficulties in extracting valuable insights or relevant information from such content. To address this challenge, machine learning and natural language processing algorithms have been deployed to analyze the vast amount of textual data available online. In recent years, topic modeling techniques have gained significant popularity in this domain. In this study, we comprehensively examine and compare five frequently used topic modeling methods specifically applied to customer reviews. The methods under investigation are latent semantic analysis (LSA), latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), non-negative matrix factorization (NMF), pachinko allocation model (PAM), Top2Vec, and BERTopic. By practically demonstrating their benefits in detecting important topics, we aim to highlight their efficacy in real-world scenarios. To evaluate the performance of these topic modeling methods, we carefully select two textual datasets. The evaluation is based on standard statistical evaluation metrics such as topic coherence score. Our findings reveal that BERTopic consistently yield more meaningful extracted topics and achieve favorable results.Comment: 13 page

A review of sentiment analysis research in Arabic language

Sentiment analysis is a task of natural language processing which has recently attracted increasing attention. However, sentiment analysis research has mainly been carried out for the English language. Although Arabic is ramping up as one of the most used languages on the Internet, only a few studies have focused on Arabic sentiment analysis so far. In this paper, we carry out an in-depth qualitative study of the most important research works in this context by presenting limits and strengths of existing approaches. In particular, we survey both approaches that leverage machine translation or transfer learning to adapt English resources to Arabic and approaches that stem directly from the Arabic language

A Multi-type Classifier Ensemble for Detecting Fake Reviews Through Textualbased Feature Extraction

The financial impact of online reviews has prompted some fraudulent sellers to generate fake consumer reviews for either promoting their products or discrediting competing products. In this study, we propose a novel ensemble model - the Multitype Classifier Ensemble (MtCE) - combined with a textual-based featuring method, which is relatively independent of the system, to detect fake online consumer reviews. Unlike other ensemble models that utilise only the same type of single classifier, our proposed ensemble utilises several customised machine learning classifiers (including deep learning models) as its base classifiers. The results of our experiments show that the MtCE can adequately detect fake reviews, and that it outperforms other single and ensemble methods in terms of accuracy and other measurements in all the relevant public datasets used in this study. Moreover, if set correctly, the parameters of MtCE, such as base-classifier types, the total number of base classifiers, bootstrap and the method to vote on output (e.g., majority or priority), further improve the performance of the proposed ensemble

Document-level sentiment analysis of email data

Sisi Liu investigated machine learning methods for Email document sentiment analysis. She developed a systematic framework that has been qualitatively and quantitatively proved to be effective and efficient in identifying sentiment from massive amount of Email data. Analytical results obtained from the document-level Email sentiment analysis framework are beneficial for better decision making in various business settings

Creating and detecting fake reviews of online products

Customers increasingly rely on reviews for product information. However, the usefulness of online reviews is impeded by fake reviews that give an untruthful picture of product quality. Therefore, detection of fake reviews is needed. Unfortunately, so far, automatic detection has only had partial success in this challenging task. In this research, we address the creation and detection of fake reviews. First, we experiment with two language models, ULMFiT and GPT-2, to generate fake product reviews based on an Amazon e-commerce dataset. Using the better model, GPT-2, we create a dataset for a classification task of fake review detection. We show that a machine classifier can accomplish this goal near-perfectly, whereas human raters exhibit significantly lower accuracy and agreement than the tested algorithms. The model was also effective on detected human generated fake reviews. The results imply that, while fake review detection is challenging for humans, “machines can fight machines” in the task of detecting fake reviews. Our findings have implications for consumer protection, defense of firms from unfair competition, and responsibility of review platforms.</p