Bengali fake reviews: A benchmark dataset and detection system

Abstract

The proliferation of fake reviews on various online platforms has created a major concern for both consumers and businesses. Such reviews can deceive customers and cause damage to the reputation of products or services, making it crucial to identify them. Although the detection of fake reviews has been extensively studied in English language, detecting fake reviews in non-English languages such as Bengali is still a relatively unexplored research area. The novelty of this study unfolds on three fronts: (i) a new publicly available dataset called Bengali Fake Review Detection (BFRD) dataset is introduced, (ii) a unique pipeline has been proposed that translates English words to their corresponding Bengali meaning and also back transliterates Romanized Bengali to Bengali, (iii) a weighted ensemble model that combines four pre-trained transformers model is proposed. The developed dataset consists of 7710 non-fake and 1339 fake food-related reviews collected from social media posts. Rigorous experiments have been conducted to compare multiple deep learning and pre-trained transformer language models and our proposed model to identify the best-performing model. According to the experimental results, the proposed ensemble model attained a weighted F1-score of 0.9843 on a dataset of 13,390 reviews, comprising 1339 actual fake reviews, 5,356 augmented fake reviews, and 6695 reviews randomly selected from the 7710 non-fake instances.