Identifying Faked Hotel Reviews Using Authorship Analysis

Author

Layton, Richard ; Watters, Paul ; Ureche, Oana

Author_Institution

Internet Commerce Security Lab., Univ. of Ballarat, Ballarat, VIC, Australia

fYear

2013

fDate

21-22 Nov. 2013

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

6

Abstract

The use of online review sites has grown significantly, allowing for communities to share information on products or services.These online review sites are marketed as being independent and trustworthy, but have been criticised for not ensuring the integrity of the reviews.One major concern is that of review fraud; where a person (such as a marketer) is paid to write favourable reviews for one product or poor reviews for a competitor.In this research we show a method for determining if two reviews share an author, which can be used to identify if a review is legitimate.Our results indicate a high quality of the method, with an f₁-score of over 0.66 in testing data with 40 authors, with most authors having only one or two documents.This type of analysis can be used to investigate cases of potential hotel review fraud.

Keywords

Web sites; authorisation; fraud; hotel industry; reviews; authorship analysis; faked hotel review identification; hotel review fraud; online Web sites; online review sites; Accuracy; Business; Internet; Mathematical model; Measurement; Robustness; Training; authorship analysis; hotel review fraud; recentred local profiles;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Cybercrime and Trustworthy Computing Workshop (CTC), 2013 Fourth

Conference_Location

Sydney NSW

Print_ISBN

978-1-4799-3075-3

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/CTC.2013.8

Filename

6754634