ACM Transactions on Internet Technology最新文献

The financial impact of online reviews has prompted some fraudulent sellers to generate fake consumer reviews for either promoting their products or discrediting competing products. In this study, we propose a novel ensemble model—the Multi-type Classifier Ensemble (MtCE)—combined with a textual-based featuring method, which is relatively independent of the system, to detect fake online consumer reviews. Unlike other ensemble models that utilise only the same type of single classifier, our proposed ensemble utilises several customised machine learning classifiers (including deep learning models) as its base classifiers. The results of our experiments show that the MtCE can adequately detect fake reviews, and that it outperforms other single and ensemble methods in terms of accuracy and other measurements for all the relevant public datasets used in this study. Moreover, if set correctly, the parameters of MtCE, such as base-classifier types, the total number of base classifiers, bootstrap, and the method to vote on output (e.g., majority or priority), can further improve the performance of the proposed ensemble.

Open market environments consist of a set of participants (vendors and consumers) that dynamically leave or join the market. As a result, the arising dynamism leads to uncertainties in supply and demand of the resources in these open markets. In specific, in such uncertain markets, vendors attempt to maximise their revenue by dynamically changing their selling prices according to the market demand. In this regard, an optimal resource allocation approach becomes immensely needed to optimise the selling prices based on the supply and demand of the resources in the open market. Therefore, optimal selling prices should maximise the revenue of vendors while protecting the utility of buyers. In this context, we propose a real-time pricing approach for resource allocation in open market environments. The proposed approach introduces a priority-based fairness mechanism to allocate the available resources in a reverse-auction paradigm. Finally, we compare the proposed approach with two state-of-the-art resource allocation approaches. The experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms the other two resource allocation approaches in its ability to maximise the vendors’ revenue.

The popularity of intelligent devices provides straightforward access to the Internet and online social networks. However, the quick and easy data updates from networks also benefit the risk spreading, such as rumor, malware, or computer viruses. To this end, this article studies the problem of source detection, which is to infer the source node out of an aftermath of a cascade, that is, the observed infected graph G_N of the network at some time. Prior arts have adopted various statistical quantities such as degree, distance, or infection size to reflect the structural centrality of the source. In this article, we propose a new metric that we call the infected tree entropy (ITE), to utilize richer underlying structural features for source detection. Our idea of ITE is inspired by the conception of structural entropy [21], which demonstrated that the minimization of average bits to encode the network structures with different partitions is the principle for detecting the natural or true structures in real-world networks. Accordingly, our proposed ITE based estimator for the source tries to minimize the coding of network partitions brought by the infected tree rooted at all the potential sources, thus minimizing the structural deviation between the cascades from the potential sources and the actual infection process included in G_N. On polynomially growing geometric trees, with increasing tree heterogeneity, the ITE estimator remarkably yields more reliable detection under only moderate infection sizes, and returns an asymptotically complete detection. In contrast, for regular expanding trees, we still observe guaranteed detection probability of ITE estimator even with an infinite infection size, thanks to the degree regularity property. We also algorithmically realize the ITE based detection that enjoys linear time complexity via a message-passing scheme, and further extend it to general graphs. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real datasets confirm the superiority of ITE to the baselines. For example, ITE returns an accuracy of 85%, ranking the source among the top 10%, far exceeding 55% of the classic algorithm on scale-free networks.

Many software systems, such as online social networks, enable users to share information about themselves. Although the action of sharing is simple, it requires an elaborate thought process on privacy: what to share, with whom to share, and for what purposes. Thinking about these for each piece of content to be shared is tedious. Recent approaches to tackle this problem build personal assistants that can help users by learning what is private over time and recommending privacy labels such as private or public to individual content that a user considers sharing. However, privacy is inherently ambiguous and highly personal. Existing approaches to recommend privacy decisions do not address these aspects of privacy sufficiently. Ideally, a personal assistant should be able to adjust its recommendation based on a given user, considering that user’s privacy understanding. Moreover, the personal assistant should be able to assess when its recommendation would be uncertain and let the user make the decision on her own. Accordingly, this article proposes a personal assistant that uses evidential deep learning to classify content based on its privacy label. An important characteristic of the personal assistant is that it can model its uncertainty in its decisions explicitly, determine that it does not know the answer, and delegate from making a recommendation when its uncertainty is high. By factoring in the user’s own understanding of privacy, such as risk factors or own labels, the personal assistant can personalize its recommendations per user. We evaluate our proposed personal assistant using a well-known dataset. Our results show that our personal assistant can accurately identify uncertain cases, personalize them to its user’s needs, and thus helps users preserve their privacy well.

Multi-turn response selection is a key issue in retrieval-based chatbots and has attracted considerable attention in the NLP (Natural Language processing) field. So far, researchers have developed many solutions that can select appropriate responses for multi-turn conversations. However, these works are still suffering from the semantic mismatch problem when responses and context share similar words with different meanings. In this article, we propose a novel chatbot model based on Semantic Awareness Matching, called SAM. SAM can capture both similarity and semantic features in the context by a two-layer matching network. Appropriate responses are selected according to the matching probability made through the aggregation of the two feature types. In the evaluation, we pick 4 widely used datasets and compare SAM’s performance to that of 12 other models. Experiment results show that SAM achieves substantial improvements, with up to 1.5% R₁₀@1 on Ubuntu Dialogue Corpus V2, 0.5% R₁₀@1 on Douban Conversation Corpus, and 1.3% R₁₀@1 on E-commerce Corpus.

Customizing and deploying an edge system are time-consuming and complex tasks because of hardware heterogeneity, third-party software compatibility, diverse performance requirements, and so on. In this article, we present TinyEdge, a holistic framework for the low-code development of edge systems. The key idea of TinyEdge is to use a top-down approach for designing edge systems. Developers select and configure TinyEdge modules to specify their interaction logic without dealing with the specific hardware or software. Taking the configuration as input, TinyEdge automatically generates the deployment package and estimates the performance with sufficient profiling. TinyEdge provides a unified development toolkit to specify module dependencies, functionalities, interactions, and configurations. We implement TinyEdge and evaluate its performance using real-world edge systems. Results show that: (1) TinyEdge achieves rapid customization of edge systems, reducing 44.15% of development time and 67.79% of lines of code on average compared with the state-of-the-art edge computing platforms; (2) TinyEdge builds compact modules and optimizes the latent circular dependency detection and message routing efficiency; (3) TinyEdge performance estimation has low absolute errors in various settings.

In this article, we present fundamental design flaws of CaptchaStar. We also present a full analysis using the BASECASS methodology that employs machine learning techniques. By means of this methodology, we find an attack that bypasses CaptchaStar with almost 100% accuracy.