The enemy in your own camp: how well can we detect statistically-generated fake reviews - an adversarial study

Dirk Hovy

16 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Online reviews are a growing market, but it is struggling with fake reviews. They undermine both the value of reviews to the user, and their trust in the review sites. However, fake positive reviews can boost a business, and so a small industry producing fake reviews has developed. The two sides are facing an arms race that involves more and more natural language processing (NLP). So far, NLP has been used mostly for detection, and works well on human-generated reviews. But what happens if NLP techniques are used to generate fake reviews as well? We investigate the question in an adversarial setup, by assessing the detectability of different fake-review generation strategies. We use generative models to produce reviews based on meta-information, and evaluate their effectiveness against deceptiondetection models and human judges. We find that meta-information helps detection, but that NLP-generated reviews conditioned on such information are also much harder to detect than conventional ones.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Number of pages6
Volume2
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics
Publication date2016
Pages351-356
ISBN (Electronic)978-1-945626-01-2
Publication statusPublished - 2016
EventACL 2016 -
Duration: 7 Aug 201612 Aug 2016

Conference

ConferenceACL 2016
Period07/08/201612/08/2016

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