Detecting Sockpuppets in Deceptive Opinion Spam

This paper explores the problem of sockpuppet detection in deceptive opinion spam using authorship attribution and verification approaches. Two methods are explored. The first is a feature subsampling scheme that uses the KL-Divergence on stylistic language models of an author to find discriminative features. The second is a transduction scheme, spy induction that leverages the diversity of authors in the unlabeled test set by sending a set of spies (positive samples) from the training set to retrieve hidden samples in the unlabeled test set using nearest and farthest neighbors. Experiments using ground truth sockpuppet data show the effectiveness of the proposed schemes.Comment: 18 pages, Accepted at CICLing 2017, 18th International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistic

Detecting Positive and Negative Deceptive Opinions using PU-learning

[EN] Nowadays a large number of opinion reviews are posted on the Web. Such reviews are a very important source of information for customers and companies. The former rely more than ever on online reviews to make their purchase decisions, and the latter to respond promptly to their clients’ expectations. Unfortunately, due to the business that is behind, there is an increasing number of deceptive opinions, that is, fictitious opinions that have been deliberately written to sound authentic, in order to deceive the consumers promoting a low quality product (positive deceptive opinions) or criticizing a potentially good quality one (negative deceptive opinions). In this paper we focus on the detection of both types of deceptive opinions, positive and negative. Due to the scarcity of examples of deceptive opinions, we propose to approach the problem of the detection of deceptive opinions employing PU-learning. PU-learning is a semi-supervised technique for building a binary classifier on the basis of positive (i.e., deceptive opinions) and unlabeled examples only. Concretely, we propose a novel method that with respect to its original version is much more conservative at the moment of selecting the negative examples (i.e., not deceptive opinions) from the unlabeled ones. The obtained results show that the proposed PU-learning method consistently outperformed the original PU-learning approach. In particular, results show an average improvement of 8.2% and 1.6% over the original approach in the detection of positive and negative deceptive opinions respectively. 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.This work is the result of the collaboration in the framework of the WIQEI IRSES project (Grant No. 269180) within the FP 7 Marie Curie. The work of the third author was in the framework the DIANA-APPLICATIONS-Finding Hidden Knowledge in Texts: Applications (TIN2012-38603-C02-01) project, and the VLC/CAMPUS Microcluster on Multimodal Interaction in Intelligent Systems.Hernández Fusilier, D.; Montes Gómez, M.; Rosso, P.; Guzmán Cabrera, R. (2015). Detecting Positive and Negative Deceptive Opinions using PU-learning. Information Processing and Management. 51(4):433-443. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2014.11.001S43344351

"Liar, Liar Pants on Fire": A New Benchmark Dataset for Fake News Detection

Automatic fake news detection is a challenging problem in deception detection, and it has tremendous real-world political and social impacts. However, statistical approaches to combating fake news has been dramatically limited by the lack of labeled benchmark datasets. In this paper, we present liar: a new, publicly available dataset for fake news detection. We collected a decade-long, 12.8K manually labeled short statements in various contexts from PolitiFact.com, which provides detailed analysis report and links to source documents for each case. This dataset can be used for fact-checking research as well. Notably, this new dataset is an order of magnitude larger than previously largest public fake news datasets of similar type. Empirically, we investigate automatic fake news detection based on surface-level linguistic patterns. We have designed a novel, hybrid convolutional neural network to integrate meta-data with text. We show that this hybrid approach can improve a text-only deep learning model.Comment: ACL 201

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

Review Spam Detection Using Machine Learning Techniques

Nowadays with the increasing popularity of internet, online marketing is going to become more and more popular. This is because, a lot of products and services are easily available online. Hence, reviews about these all products and services are very important for customers as well as organizations. Unfortunately, driven by the will for profit or promotion, fraudsters used to produce fake reviews. These fake reviews written by fraudsters prevent customers and organizations reaching actual conclusions about the products. Hence, fake reviews or review spam must be detected and eliminated so as to prevent deceptive potential customers. In our work, supervised and semi-supervised learning technique have been applied to detect review spam. The most apt data sets in the research area of review spam detection has been used in proposed work. For supervised learning, we try to obtain some feature sets from different automated approaches such as LIWC, POS Tagging, N-gram etc., that can best distinguish the spam and non-spam reviews. Along with these features sentiment analysis, data mining and opinion mining technique have also been applied. For semi-supervised learning, PU-learning algorithm is being used along with six different classifiers (Decision Tree, Naive Bayes, Support Vector Machine, k-Nearest Neighbor, Random Forest, Logistic Regression) to detect review spam from the available data set. Finally, a comparison of proposed technique with some existing review spam detection techniques has been done

Fake Opinion Detection: How Similar are Crowdsourced Datasets to Real Data?

[EN] Identifying deceptive online reviews is a challenging tasks for Natural Language Processing (NLP). Collecting corpora for the task is difficult, because normally it is not possible to know whether reviews are genuine. A common workaround involves collecting (supposedly) truthful reviews online and adding them to a set of deceptive reviews obtained through crowdsourcing services. Models trained this way are generally successful at discriminating between `genuine¿ online reviews and the crowdsourced deceptive reviews. It has been argued that the deceptive reviews obtained via crowdsourcing are very different from real fake reviews, but the claim has never been properly tested. In this paper, we compare (false) crowdsourced reviews with a set of `real¿ fake reviews published on line. We evaluate their degree of similarity and their usefulness in training models for the detection of untrustworthy reviews. We find that the deceptive reviews collected via crowdsourcing are significantly different from the fake reviews published online. In the case of the artificially produced deceptive texts, it turns out that their domain similarity with the targets affects the models¿ performance, much more than their untruthfulness. This suggests that the use of crowdsourced datasets for opinion spam detection may not result in models applicable to the real task of detecting deceptive reviews. As an alternative method to create large-size datasets for the fake reviews detection task, we propose methods based on the probabilistic annotation of unlabeled texts, relying on the use of meta-information generally available on the e-commerce sites. Such methods are independent from the content of the reviews and allow to train reliable models for the detection of fake reviews.Leticia Cagnina thanks CONICET for the continued financial support. 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Fake Review Detection using Data Mining

Online spam reviews are deceptive evaluations of products and services. They are often carried out as a deliberate manipulation strategy to deceive the readers. Recognizing such reviews is an important but challenging problem. In this work, I try to solve this problem by using different data mining techniques. I explore the strength and weakness of those data mining techniques in detecting fake review. I start with different supervised techniques such as Support Vector Ma- chine (SVM), Multinomial Naive Bayes (MNB), and Multilayer Perceptron. The results attest that all the above mentioned supervised techniques can successfully detect fake review with more than 86% accuracy. Then, I work on a semi-supervised technique which reduces the dimension- ality of the input features vector but offers similar performance to existing approaches. I use a combination of topic modeling and SVM for the implementation of the semi-supervised tech- nique. I also compare the results with other approaches that consider all the words of a dataset as input features. I found that topic words are enough as input features to get similar accuracy compared to other approaches where researchers consider all the words as input features. At the end, I propose an unsupervised learning approach named as Words Basket Analysis for fake re- view detection. I utilize five Amazon products review dataset for an experiment and report the performance of the proposed on these datasets