EUPHORIA: A neural multi-view approach to combine content and behavioral features in review spam detection

Abstract

Nowadays, online reviews are the main source to customer opinions. They are especially important in the realm of e-commerce, where reviews regarding products and services influence the purchase decisions of customers, as well as the reputation of the commerce websites. Unfortunately, not all the online reviews are truthful and trustworthy. Therefore, it is crucial to develop machine learning techniques to detect review spam. This study describes EUPHORIA — a novel classification approach to distinguish spam from truthful reviews. This approach couples multi-view learning to deep learning, in order to gain accuracy by accounting for the variety of information possibly associated with both the reviews’ content and the reviewers’ behavior. Experiments carried out on two real review datasets from Yelp.com – Hotel and Restaurant – show that the use of multi-view learning can improve the performance of a deep learning classifier trained for review spam detection. In particular, the proposed approach achieves AUC-ROC equal to 0.813 and 0.708 in Hotel and Restaurant, respectively.