A linguistic framework to distinguish between genuine and deceptive online reviews

Snehasish Banerjee, Alton Y.K. Chua

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

Abstract

With the advent of social media, online reviews are increasingly perceived as being more genuine than traditional marketer-generated information. However, users’ growing penchant for reviews has resulted in the rise of deceptive opinion spamming, which involves posting misleading reviews to influence users’ impression on products and services insidiously. As a result, it has become challenging for users to distinguish between genuine and deceptive reviews. Hence, this paper develops a linguistic framework to distinguish between genuine and deceptive reviews based on their readability, genre and writing style. The framework is empirically tested by drawing from publicly available secondary datasets. The findings suggest that readability and writing style of reviews could be significant linguistic cues to distinguish between genuine and deceptive comments. In terms of genre however, differences between genuine and deceptive reviews were largely inconspicuous.
Original languageEnglish
Pages501-506
Number of pages6
Publication statusPublished - 2014
EventInternational MultiConference of Engineers and Computer Scientists: International Conference on Internet Computing and Web Services - , Hong Kong
Duration: 12 Mar 201414 Mar 2014
http://www.iaeng.org/IMECS2014/

Conference

ConferenceInternational MultiConference of Engineers and Computer Scientists
Country/TerritoryHong Kong
Period12/03/1414/03/14
Internet address

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