2022 IEEE International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing with Applications and 2022 IEEE International

Conference on Ubiquitous Computing and Communications (ISPA/IUCC)

Semi-supervised Learning based Fake Review Detection

Huaxun Deng, Linfeng Zhao, Ning Luo, Yuan Liu∗, Guibing Guo, Xingwei Wang,
Zhenhua Tan, Shuang Wang and Fucai Zhou
∗
Software College, Northeastern University, Shen Yang, Liao Ning, China, 110169
Email: *liuyuan@mail.neu.edu.cn

Abstract—The impact of product reviews on the business
platform is growing, giving consumers more information
about their products and directly influencing consumers’
buying decisions. However, the existence of fake reviews
makes the consumer cannot make the right judgments of
sellers, which can also causes the credibility of the platform
downgraded. Thus, it is of practical significance to identify the
fake reviews in the platform. The way of manually
annotating the data set is difficult, meanwhile it is nearly
impossible to make the correct annotation by reading only a
small portion of comments based on the classifier trained
under the traditional method. In previous studies, it has been
shown that false comments have characteristics such as high
similarity in content and high concentration of comments.
In this paper, we propose a new algorithm to identify fake
reviews based on semi- supervised learning method. Real data
based experiments have demonstrated that the proposed
method can achieve desired performance.
Keywords-Fake review, Similarity, Semi-supervised learning
I. INTRODUCTION
As the technology of e-commerce continues to grow
rapidly, the impact of reviews online increases. For con-
sumers, the reviews become an essential way for them to
get more information of the product quality helping them to
make purchase decision. For business owners, the reviews
give an effort to improve and enhance their businesses. The
feedback from the customer reviews is helpful for product
improvements. However, the reviews may not always be
truthfully provided and fake reviews generally exist. The
business owners may pay someone to write good reviews
about their own products or bad reviews about their competi-
tors products. These fake reviews lead the consumers making
wrong judgments about the product quality. Therefore, de-
tecting fake reviews is important and is also a challenging
issue in both industrial and academic areas.
Researchers have proposed various fake review detection
approaches. The methods can be divided into two categories:
review centric review spam detection and reviewer centric
review spam detection [1]. In the first category, researchers
use machine learning techniques to build models with con-
tent and metadata of the reviews. Supervised learning refers
to the task of learning from labelled data [2] and is the
most prevalent method used for review spam detection [1].
In the second category, the spammers can be identified via
the similar review contents and similar time they post the
reviews. Gathering the behavioural of the spammers can
detect them well [3].
However, most of the above studies depend on supervised
learning requires labelled data set which is difficult to
build because it is hard to label a huge amount of data
accurately. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm based
on PU-Learning considering multi-aspect features, which
uses a few labelled data and a large amount of unlabelled
data to classify the reviews. In the proposed model, the
features are captured from two aspects, including metadata
features and review content features. We use autoencoder
for dimensionality reduction and use K-means to classify
the data. According to the classification results, our method
can properly label the unlabelled data and achieve a neural
network based classifier with designed performance.
II. RELATED WORK
The previous research on fake review detection can be
roughly divided into three aspects: based on the single
comment characteristic, based on the entire comment char-
acteristic and based on the comment dataset.
The first type of methods is based on the single comment
characteristic. Deng song [4] and his fellow analyse the
comment from all aspects, for instance, based on the number
of comments, frequency, length and so on. They use the
unsupervised clustering techniques to distinguish the fake
comments for the technology products.
In the second type of methods based on the entire
comment characteristic, Wu et al [5] collect a set of data
from a specific product for a long time, aiming to find the
characteristic of the comments. After analysing, he draws a
conclusion that the early comments of the product are quite
different from the late comments of the product.
In the third type of methods based on the comment
dataset, Jindal N[7] and his fellow also assert that the
highly similarly comments are fake comments. Therefore,
they hire a group of people to label the data according to
this principle. After that, they also introduce the supervised
learning using these label data to detect the fake review. Ott
M using Mechanical Amazon Mechanical Turk II crowd-
sourcing platform to create an English golden data set of
the fake review. After that, he utilizes the traditional text
classification techniques to distinguish the fake comments.

0-7695-6329-5/17/31.00 ©2022 IEEE 1278

DOI 10.1109/ISPA/IUCC.2017.00195
 III. BUILD REVIEW FEATURE VECTOR
Before introducing our method in detecting fake reviews,
we first process the input of our module by quantifying
the features. We classify the features as metadata
features, review content features. The features of a review
is denoted by a vector
{ X = xlength, xuserLevel, xisMobile, R
, where the first }three values are metadata features and
R is set of features related with the review content.
A. Metadata Feature
The first metadata feature is the length of the review,
which is quantified as follows.
xlength = length(review) (1)
where length(review) indicates the length of the review
content.
As different evaluation features often have different di-
mensions and dimension units, and such a situation will
affect the results of data analysis. To eliminate the above
influence, we need to normalize the above feature, so that
it is comparable with other features, suitable for compre-
hensive evaluation. For normalization, we used min-max
normalization:
x − xmin
x∗ = (2)
xmax − xmin
where x∗ means the sample data after normalization. x
means the sample data before normalization. xmax means
the biggest data in the sample dataset. xmin means the
smallest data in the sample dataset.
The other two metadata features xuserLevel, xisMobile are
processed in the similar way. In the following discussion,
we will misuse xlength, xuserLevel,and xisMobile as the value
after normalization.
B. Review Content Feature
1) Text Segment and Content Related Feature Quantifi-
cation: The review content features are mainly about the
text content of the review, and the process is divided into
two steps: text segmentation and the document feature vector
establishment. After text segmentation, we use bag of words
model in which each review is represented by a feature
vector R:
R = (t1, t2, t3, ..., ti, ..., tm) (3)
where m is the total number of the words in the bag, and ti
records the number of occurrences of the i-th word. When
a word does not appear in a review, ti = 0.
2) Dimensionality Reduction: It’s necessary to reduce the
dimension of the review content vector. We use autoencoder
to reduce dimension [8]. It takes the input R and first uses
an encoder to map it to a hidden representation Y through
an activation function such as sigmoid. After that, we map
it back using a decoder into a reconstruction Z of the same
shape as R.
Y = f θ (R)= s(WR + b) (4)
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Z = gθ' (Y ) = s(W ∗Y + b∗) (5)
The parameter of encoder is θ = W, b and the parameter
of decoder is θ∗ = W ∗, b∗ . W is the weight matrix and W ∗ =
W T . We use the following loss function to make Z to be
the same size as R.
n
Σ
L(R, Z)= KL(Ri||Zi) (6)
i=1
where R is a matrix of samples consists of n vectors.
KL(Ri ||Zi) is the KullbackLeibler divergence of input
vector Ri and output Zi, to measure the difference
between Ri and Zi. The autoencoder use stochastic
gradient descent method to train the network and the
weight matrix updates as follows where l is the updating
step [4].
∂L(r,
z) W → W − l ∗ (7)
∂W
IV. SEMI-SUPERVISED LEARNING TO DETECT FAKE
REVIEW
PU-Learning is a semi-supervised classification technique.
It’s described as a two-step strategy which addresses the
problem of building a two-class classifier with only positive
and unlabelled examples[9]. In our model, we build classifier
with relative negative and unlabeled examples.
According to the previous work for fake review
detection, we can find that the similarity is an important
feature to detect fake reviews. First, we labelled review as
true fake review sample which is duplicates or near-
duplicates with other reviews. Then the following two steps
are repeated. In the first step, we use K-means to classify
the whole set and divide the set into k groups. In the
second step, we calculate the percentage of the true fake
review examples pi in each group. Define pl as the
maximum threshold and ps as the minimum threshold. If
the pi is larger than pl, we consider the rest of reviews in
this group are fake. If pi is 0 or pi < ps, calculate the
distance between the centre of this group and the centre of
another group with pi > pl. We set the reviews in the group
which has the biggest distance as the normal review
examples.
In the next iteration, we adjust the k, pl and ps, then
classify the data. This process repeates until the rest data
are labelled as fake review or not.
V. EXPERIMENTAL EVALUATIONS
A. The Real Dataset
One of the problems of dataset on fake reviews is the
absence of a golden dataset. According to the previous re-
search, we use the similarity feature to label relative negative
examples. In our experiment, all the data we use is crawled
from JD.com. an ecommerce platform. We selected around
one hundred products related to the electronic products.
We collect 48562 comments data. After that, we eliminate
some useless comments according to the following principle.
Firstly, we eliminate the comments whose text is the same
or the textual similarity is high. Secondly, we eliminate the
comments which can not constitute a complete sentence or
the content of the comment is not semantic. Thirdly, we
eliminate the comments whose length of the content is less
than 20 words. Following these principles, we eliminate
17994 comments, leaving the 30568 valid comments.
B. Evaluation Results
Our model is including three processes: building the
review feature vector, dividing the data into two classes,
training the classifier using neural network.
1) Building the Review Feature Vector: The data named
’afterdays’ means how long the consumer give the additional
comments. The data named ’score’ means the consumer
give his opintion about the product. The data named ‘use-
fulyvotecount’ means the other customer think this review
is useful for his judgement towards this product. the data
named ’length’ means the length of the review text. The
data named ’viewcout’ means how many other customers
review this comment. The data named ’replycount’ means
how many reply in this comment from the consumer to the
customer. The data named ’userLevel’ means the JD Level
of the consumer. The data named ’isMobile’ means if the
consumer buy this product via phone. The data named ’days’
means how long the consumer comment this product after
receiving the product. the data named ’uelessVoteCount’
means how many customers think this comment is useless.
2) Dividing the Data into Two Classes: For each turn
we set different k, ps, pl to classify data into different set.
The following table shows the parameters we set at each
turn. We choose 2000 reviews and 800 reviews are negative
examples.
To illustrate the accuracy of identify the unlabelled data,
we choose some labelled data as the test data set. The
following table shows the result of identification.
Table I
THE ACCURACY OF IDENTIFY THE UNLABELLED
DATA
Dataset Accuracy
600-Labelled,200-Test Data 87.6%
700-Labelled,100-Test Data 89.3%
VI. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we consider both the metadata features
and content related features to construct a semi-supervised
learning based fake review classifier. Firstly, we use the
similarity characteristics of the text to determine a set of true
negative cases or fake reviews and extract the characteristic
vector from multiple aspects. Then, we take the technique
of K-Means to cluster towards the comments. We label the
comments as the negative case if the comments is close
to the true negative cases, whereas label the comments
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as the positive case if the comment far away from the
trusted negative case. After iterations, we finally get the
positive set LP and the negative set LN. Eventually, our
experiment proves the proposed model can detect the fake
review effectively.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This research is partially supported by the National Sci-
ence Foundation for Distinguished Young Scholars of China
under Grant No.61225012 and No.71325002; National Nat-
ural Science Foundation of China under Grant No.61402097
and No.61602102; the Natural Science Foundation of
Liaoning Province of China under Grant No.20170540319,
201602261; and the Fundamental Research Funds for
the Central Universities under Grant No. N162410002,
N161704001, N151708005, N161704004.
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