Spammer group detection and diversification of customers’ reviews

Abstract

Online reviews regarding different products or services have become the main source to determine public opinions. Consequently, manufacturers and sellers are extremely concerned with customer reviews as these have a direct impact on their businesses. Unfortunately, to gain profit or fame, spam reviews are written to promote or demote targeted products or services. This practice is known as review spamming. In recent years, Spam Review Detection problem (SRD) has gained much attention from researchers, but still there is a need to identify review spammers who often work collaboratively to promote or demote targeted products. It can severely harm the review system. This work presents the Spammer Group Detection (SGD) method which identifies suspicious spammer groups based on the similarity of all reviewer’s activities considering their review time and review ratings. After removing these identified spammer groups and spam reviews, the resulting non-spam reviews are displayed using diversification technique. For the diversification, this study proposed Diversified Set of Reviews (DSR) method which selects diversified set of top-k reviews having positive, negative, and neutral reviews/feedback covering all possible product features. Experimental evaluations are conducted on Roman Urdu and English real-world review datasets. The results show that the proposed methods outperformed the existing approaches when compared in terms of accuracy.