A deep learning approach for detecting fake reviewers: Exploiting reviewing behavior and textual information

Abstract

Ensuring the credibility of online consumer reviews (OCRs) is a growing societal concern. However, the problem of fake reviewers on online platforms significantly influences e-commerce authenticity and consumer trust. Existing studies for fake reviewer detection mainly focus on deriving novel behavioral and linguistic features. These features require extensive human labor and expertise, placing a heavy burden on platforms. Therefore, we propose a novel end-to-end framework to detect fake reviewers based on behavior and textual information. It has two key components: (1) a behavior-sensitive feature extractor that learns the underlying patterns of reviewing behavior; (2) a context-aware attention mechanism that extracts valuable features from online reviews. We rigorously evaluate each proposed module and the entire framework against state-of-the-art benchmarks on two real-world datasets from http://Yelp.com. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art results on fake reviewer detection. Our method can be considered a tentative step toward lowering human labor costs in realizing automated fake reviewer detection on e-commerce platforms.