Identifying Deceptive Reviews: Feature Exploration, Model Transferability and Classification Attack

Abstract

The temptation to influence and sway public opinion most certainly increases with the growth of open online forums where anyone anonymously can express their views and opinions. Since online review sites are a popular venue for opinion influencing attacks, there is a need to automatically identify deceptive posts. The main focus of this work is on automatic identification of deceptive reviews, both positive and negative biased. With this objective, we build a deceptive review SVM based classification model and explore the performance impact of using different feature types (TF-IDF, word2vec, PCFG). Moreover, we study the transferability of trained classification models applied to review data sets of other types of products, and, the classifier robustness, i.e., the accuracy impact, against attacks by stylometry obfuscation trough machine translation. Our findings show that i) we achieve an accuracy of over 90% using different feature types, ii) the trained classification models do not perform well when applied on other data sets containing reviews of different products, and iii) machine translation only slightly impacts the results and can not be used as a viable attack method.