A deceptive review detection framework: Combination of coarse and fine-grained features

Electronic commerce has become a popular shopping mode. To enhance their reputations, attract more customers, and finally obtain more benefits, dishonest sellers often recruit buyers or robots to post a large number of deceptive reviews to mislead users. According to the interpretability of learning results, existing methods for detecting deceptive reviews can be mainly divided into explicit feature-based mining ones and neural network-based implicit feature mining ones. The nature of these works is accurate text classification based on coarse-grained features (e.g., topic, sentence, and document) or fine-grained features (e.g., word). To take full merits of existing approaches, this paper proposes a new framework that explores a method to combine the coarse-grained features and the fine-grained features. In this framework, the coarse-grained implicit semantic features of the topic distribution are learned by the concatenation of a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model and a 2-layered neural network. The fine-grained implicit semantic features from the word vectors representation of the reviews are parallelly learned by a deep learning framework. Finally, these two granular features are combined and adopted to train a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier for detecting whether a review is deceptive or not. To verify the effectiveness and performance of this framework, we derive three models by specifying three popular deep learning models, such as TextCNN, long short-term memory (LSTM), and Bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM) to learn the fine-grained features. Experimental results on a mixed-domain dataset and balanced/unbalanced in-domain datasets show that all the combination models are superior to the corresponding baseline models considering single features. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.