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IEEE International Conference on Innovations in Green Energy and Healthcare Technologies(ICIGEHT’17)
A SURVEY ON ONLINE REVIEW SPAM DETECTION
TECHNIQUES
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SP.Rajamohana, 2Dr.K.Umamaheswari, 3M.Dharani, 4R.Vedackshya
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Assistant Professor (Sr.Gr), 2Professor, 3UG Student, 4 UG Student
Department of Information Technology, PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore-4, India.
ABSTRACT
The development of Internet influenced
many of our day-to-day activities.
Ecommerce is one of the rapid growth
areas in the Internet era. People are eager
to buy products from online sites like
Amazon, ebay, Flipkart etc. Online sites
also provide facility for customers to write
review on products they buy. These
reviews help consumers and vendors for
making decision on marketing strategies,
and the improvement of products and
services. Nowadays people are very much
interested to read reviews before
purchasing any product and getting
services. This makes areas for opinion
spammers to write fake reviews to promote
or to demote both products and business
services. This type of activities is often
referred as Review spam. Thus detecting
fake reviews has become more critical
issue for customers to make better decision
on purchase as well as the vendors to make
their products trustworthy. In this paper a
detailed survey is done using various
machine learning techniques for detecting
spam and genuine reviews.
Keywords: Fake reviews, Fake Review
Detection Techniques, Feature Selection
and Classification.
I. INTRODUCTION
“What other people think” has always been
an important piece of information for most
of us during the decision-making process.
Presently, web users post their reviews and
978-1-5090-5778-8/17/$31.00©2017 IEEE
Department of BME & EEE, Dr.N.G.P. Institute of Technology
opinions on websites, blogs, social media
like Facebook and Twitter, web-forums, e-
commerce sites, RSS feeds etc. These
opinions are helpful for both business
organizations and individuals. This
reviewing systems encourages some
people to enter their fake review to
promote some products or defame some
others [1]. Those people are called opinion
spammers and their actions are called
opinion spamming. The main reason for
this action is to make more profit by
writing untrustworthy reviews and
deceitful ratings .So to make products and
services trustable, these faked opinions
must be detected and removed. Detection
techniques are used to find fake reviews,
fake reviewers and fake reviewer group
[2].
This survey paper exchange views about
various methodologies adapted for
detecting fake review and opinion
spammers. The rest of the paper discusses
about the types of reviews spam and
accuracy level achieved using technology.
II. TYPES OF REVIEW SPAM
Type-I Un-truthful review – the reviews
written are not based on genuine
experiences of reviewers of using the
products or services. The review posted
are classified into two -hyper spam
(contain undeserving positive opinions
about some target entities in order to
promote the entities) and defaming spam
(contains false negative opinions about
some other entities in order to damage
their reputations) [1].

IEEE International Conference on Innovations in Green Energy and Healthcare Technologies(ICIGEHT’17)
Type-II Review on brand only- comments
only on the brands or the manufacturers of
the products. Some may be genuine, but
are considered as spam as they are not
targeted at specific products [1].
Type-III Non- Reviews – it is not a
review, but has advertisements and other
irrelevant reviews containing no opinions
(e.g., questions, answers, and random
text). A spammer may work individually,
or knowingly or unknowingly work as a
member of a group [1].
III. ADAPTED METHODS
A. Language model and feature selection
This method detects Type-I and
Type-II review spam.
Type-I uses n-gram model to detect
duplicates by checking whether
a. There is same review for same product
from different user ids
b. There is same review for different
products from same and different user ids
c. There is a same user id for different
products.
Type-II uses feature selection to detect
brand spam. The duplicates are observed
with semantic language model. This model
has more efficiency and effectiveness for
finding duplicates. This experiment results
company to improve their sales
performance and customers to buy
products [3].
B. Modified method of iterative
computation framework
This method is used for detecting
Type-I, Type-II and Type-III of review
spam.
Type-I and II are solved by the ICF++
method- undergoes several stages like Pos
tagging, creation of transaction file, FP
Department of BME & EEE, Dr.N.G.P. Institute of Technology
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growth, polarity generation and calculation
of agreement value. Using these methods
the review is evaluated. The performance
of this model is also compared with other
detection techniques. The product name,
reviewer name, review (text) and minsup
are taken as inputs and undergoes three
iteration to detect fake reviews.
Type–III used IR- based evaluation
strategy. The number of times a reviewer
gives opposite opinion to other reviews of
same product is checked to detect a review
spam. The accuracy level of ICF++ is 6%
higher than the ICF method. The ICF++
method, detects fake review only in short
span of time. The accuracy difference
between ICF and ICF++ is only 6% [4].
C. Learning to Identify Review Spam
In this paper, one builds a review
spam collection board on crawled
reviews. They employ supervised
learning methods and analyze the effect
of different features in review spam
identification. Based on the fact that the
spammer consistently writes spam, we
can identify if the author of the review is
spammer. To exploit the large amount of
unlabeled data, one provides a “two-
view-semi supervised methods”.
The results show that two-view-Co-
training algorithms can achieve better
results than single-view algorithms. The
designed machine learning methods
achieve certain improvement as
compared with the heuristic baselines. In
future they planned to exploit the two
view algorithm and also to test co-
training algorithm in other opinion
resources such as blog or twitter [5].
D. Detection of Fake Review and Brand
Spam Using Data Mining Technique
This method detects Type-I and
Type-II review spam.

IEEE International Conference on Innovations in Green Energy and Healthcare Technologies(ICIGEHT’17)
a. The system first downloads (or crawls)
all the reviews, and put them in the review
database.
b. The dataset contains many reviews
hence clustering algorithm is used for
clustering the reviews in the groups and
individual text file ARFF is generated for
each group.
c. This ARFF file is given as a input to the
classifier, and the classifier is used for
detecting the reviews.
d. After completing the process of
classification, fake and truthful reviews are
identified. These reviews now qualify for
the further checking for Brand Spam
detection.
This paper mainly focuses on review
centric spam identification which provides
greater focus on feedback content. As part
of future work, we can enhance review
spammer identification into the review
identification and vice versa. Exploring
different ways to learn behaviour patterns
which are related to the spamming so as to
improve the accuracy of the current
regression model is an interesting research
direction in current era [6].
E. Exploiting Task Relatedness and
Unlabeled Data
In this paper they first developed a
multi-task learning method through
logistic regression (MTL-LR). This allows
to enhance the learning for one task by
sharing the knowledge contained in the
training signals of other related tasks. To
influence graph Laplacian regularizer into
each base model, and proposed a semi-
supervised multitask learning model
through Laplacian regularised logistic
regression (SMTL-LLR). They developed
a stochastic alternating method to deal
with the optimization problem.
Department of BME & EEE, Dr.N.G.P. Institute of Technology
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The results demonstrated the superiority of
SMTL-LLR over various well established
baseline methods. But they have not
considered the truth review data for
microblogs or forum planners to
incorporate the model into a practical
opinion mining system [7].
F. Hybrid Optimization Algorithm of
improved Binary particle swarm
Optimization (ibpso) and Cuckoo Search
for Review Spam Detection
In this paper, they have implemented
hybrid approach of iBPSO and cuckoo
search for feature subset selection. In
iBPSO, they have combined linearly
decreasing inertia weight with
convergence factor for exploration and
exploitation. After certain number of
iterations, algorithm provides optimized
feature subset. Binary cuckoo search is
used for feature selection. Classification
accuracy is considered as fitness function.
In testing, classification is done using
Naive Bayes and kNN algorithm.
Experimental results show that hybrid
approach outperforms well.
G. An Effective Hybrid Cuckoo Search
with Harmony Search for Review Spam
Detection
In this work, they have used Type I
review. They have considered Ott et al[8]
hotel review dataset.
a.Preprocessing technique is applied to
remove punctuation and stop words such
as article, preposition from the dataset.
b.Hybrid approach of cuckoo and harmony
search algorithm is applied for feature
selection and Naive Bayes and kNN
classifier is used for classification.
The results show that hybrid algorithm
identifies good quality of feature subset
than the binary cuckoo search algorithm.
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IEEE International Conference on Innovations in Green Energy and Healthcare Technologies(ICIGEHT’17)

Hybrid approach achieves 91% accuracy

using Naive Bayes classifier.

Type of Evaluation
S.no Dataset Techniques
Paper Title Review Metrics
used used
spam
Accuracy:
SMTL-LLR: 87.2%
MTL-LR: 85.2%
Online Review Spam Detection Restaurant Hotel Unigram,
Type-I, MTRL: 84.0%
A Using Language Model and and Doctor Bigram SMTL-
Type-II TSVM: 82.9%
Feature Selection Dataset LLR
LR: 82.1%
SVM: 81.8%
PU: 72.6%
Fake Review Detection From A
Type-I, Precision :
Product Review Using Modified ICF
B Type-II, ICF:57%
Method of Iterative Computation Amazon Dataset ICF++
Type-III ICF++:63%.
Framework
Precision,Recall and
Fmeasure
NB :0.517 0.669
0.583
NB-Bootstrapping:
Learning To Identify Review Unigram and
C Epinions Dataset Type-I 0.621 0.575 0.597 Co-
Spam Bigram
Training 0.630 0.589
0.609
Co-
Training(Agreement)
:0.641 0.621 0.631
Detection of Fake Review and Accuracy:
Type-I,
D Brand Spam Using Data Mining Amazon Dataset NLP Techniques Naive Bayes:96%
Type-II
Technique SVM:98%
Precision,Recall and
Fmeasure
BIGRAMS-SVM
:0.714 0.696 0.732
Deceptive Review Spam TRIGRAMS-SVM
Amazon Hotel Convolutional
E Detection via Exploiting Task Type-I 0.722 0.703 0.741
Review Dataset Neural Network
Relatedness and Unlabeled Data PWCC 0.749 0.741
0.759
Bagging 0.772 0.764
0.781

Hybrid Optimization Algorithm

of Improved Binary Particle Feature Selection: Accuracy
Hotel Review
F Swarm Optimization (Ibpso) And Type-I iBPSO and Naive Bayes:96.97%
Dataset
Cuckoo Search for Review Spam Cuckoo Search kNN:88.23%
Detection
An Effective Hybrid Cuckoo
Search with Harmony Search for Feature Selection Accuracy
Hotel Review
G Review Spam Detection Type-I : Cuckoo with Naive Bayes:91.12%
Dataset
Harmony Search kNN:82.34%

Performance Analysis of Review Spam Detection Techniques –Table 1

Department of BME & EEE, Dr.N.G.P. Institute of Technology

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IEEE International Conference on Innovations in Green Energy and Healthcare Technologies(ICIGEHT’17)

V CONCLUSION

Deceptive reviews available in the

internet that increasingly affects businesses
and customers. Hence it is important to
detect and eliminate such fake reviews
from online websites. This paper reveals
several approaches used for review spam
detection and performance measures were
identified. This paper identified Type I,
Type II and Type III reviews. This topic
needs further research in Big Data
approach to reduce the number of features
and computational complexity which helps
to improve the detection methods, and also
consider other kinds of media such as
forums, blogs etc. Still it needs to be
exposed yet in this regard.

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Department of BME & EEE, Dr.N.G.P. Institute of Technology