Towards a highly effective and robust Web credibility evaluation system

Abstract

By leveraging crowdsourcing, Web credibility evaluation systems (WCESs) have become a promising tool to assess the credibility of Web content, e.g., Web pages. However, existing systems adopt a passive way to collect users' credibility ratings, which incurs two crucial challenges: (1) a considerable fraction of Web content have few or even no ratings, so the coverage (or effectiveness) of the system is low; (2) malicious users may submit fake ratings to damage the reliability of the system. In order to realize a highly effective and robust WCES, we propose to integrate recommendation functionality into the system. On the one hand, by fusing Matrix Factorization and Latent Dirichlet Allocation, a personalized Web content recommendation model is proposed to attract users to rate more Web pages, i.e., the coverage is increased. On the other hand, by analyzing a user's reaction to the recommended Web content, we detect imitating attackers, which have recently been recognized as a particular threat to WCES to make the system more robust. Moreover, an adaptive reputation system is designed to motivate users to more actively interact with the integrated recommendation functionality. We conduct experiments using both real datasets and synthetic data to demonstrate how our proposed recommendation components significantly improve the effectiveness and robustness of existing WCES.