Skip to main content

GLORIA: A Graph Convolutional Network-Based Approach for Review Spam Detection

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Discovery Science (DS 2023)

Abstract

Spam reviews contain untruthful content created with malevolent intent, to affect the overall reputation of a product, service or company. This content is commonly made by malicious users or automated programs (i.e., bots) that mimic human behaviour. With the recent boom of online review systems, performing accurate review spam detection has become of primary importance for a review platform, to mitigate the effect of malicious users responsible for untruthful content. In this work, we propose a review spam classification approach, named GLORIA, that adopts a graph representation of review data and trains a graph convolutional neural network for edge classification as a review spam detection model. In particular, GLORIA represents both users (i.e., authors of reviews) and products (i.e., reviewed items) as nodes of a heterogeneous graph, while it represents reviews as graph edges that connect each author of a review to the reviewed item. Features of users, products and reviews are associated with nodes and edges, respectively.

Experiments performed on publicly available review datasets prove the effectiveness of the proposed approach compared with some state-of-the-art approaches.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 69.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 89.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/robertogasbarro/GLORIA.

References

  1. Ali Alhosseini, S., Bin Tareaf, R., Najafi, P., Meinel, C.: Detect me if you can: spam bot detection using inductive representation learning. In: Companion Proceedings of the 2019 World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2019, pp. 148–153. Association for Computing Machinery, New York (2019). https://doi.org/10.1145/3308560.3316504

  2. Andresini, G., Iovine, A., Gasbarro, R., Lomolino, M., de Gemmis, M., Appice, A.: Review spam detection using multi-view deep learning combining content and behavioral features. In: CEUR Workshop Proceedings, vol. 3340, pp. 87–98 (2022)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Andresini, G., Appice, A., Caforio, F.P., Malerba, D., Vessio, G.: ROULETTE: a neural attention multi-output model for explainable network intrusion detection. Expert Syst. Appl. 117144 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2022.117144

  4. Andresini, G., Appice, A., Malerba, D.: Dealing with class imbalance in android malware detection by cascading clustering and classification. In: Appice, A., Ceci, M., Loglisci, C., Manco, G., Masciari, E., Ras, Z.W. (eds.) Complex Pattern Mining. SCI, vol. 880, pp. 173–187. Springer, Cham (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36617-9_11

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  5. Andresini, G., Iovine, A., Gasbarro, R., Lomolino, M., de Gemmis, M., Appice, A.: Euphoria: a neural multi-view approach to combine content and behavioral features in review spam detection. J. Comput. Math. Data Sci. 3, 100036 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcmds.2022.100036

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Appice, A., Malerba, D.: Segmentation-aided classification of hyperspectral data using spatial dependency of spectral bands. ISPRS J. Photogramm. Remote. Sens. 147, 215–231 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isprsjprs.2018.11.023

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Bhuvaneshwari, P., Rao, A., Robinson, H.: Spam review detection using self attention based CNN and bi-directional LSTM. Multimed. Tools Appl. 80, 1–18 (2021)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Cheng, J., Chunkai, Z., Dong, L.: A geometric-information-enhanced crystal graph network for predicting properties of materials. Commun. Mater. 2 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43246-021-00194-3

  9. Crawford, M., Khoshgoftaar, T.M., Prusa, J.D., Richter, A.N., Al Najada, H.: Survey of review spam detection using machine learning techniques. J. Big Data 2(1), 1–24 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40537-015-0029-9

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Dugas, C., Bengio, Y., Bélisle, F., Nadeau, C., Garcia, R.: Incorporating second-order functional knowledge for better option pricing. In: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NIPS 2000, pp. 451–457. MIT Press, Cambridge (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Ferrara, E.: The history of digital spam. Commun. ACM 62(8), 82–91 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1145/3299768

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Glorot, X., Bordes, A., Bengio, Y.: Deep sparse rectifier neural networks. In: AISTATS, pp. 315–323. JMLR.org (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Han, J., Moraga, C.: The influence of the sigmoid function parameters on the speed of backpropagation learning. In: Mira, J., Sandoval, F. (eds.) IWANN 1995. LNCS, vol. 930, pp. 195–201. Springer, Heidelberg (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-59497-3_175

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  14. Heydari, A., ali Tavakoli, M., Salim, N., Heydari, Z.: Detection of review spam: a survey. Expert Syst. Appl. 42(7), 3634–3642 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2014.12.029

  15. Hussain, N., Mirza, H., Hussain, I., Iqbal, F., Memon, I.: Spam review detection using the linguistic and spammer behavioral methods. IEEE Access 8, 53801–53816 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2979226

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Hussain, N., Turab Mirza, H., Rasool, G., Hussain, I., Kaleem, M.: Spam review detection techniques: a systematic literature review. Appl. Sci. 9(5) (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Jindal, N., Liu, B.: Opinion spam and analysis. In: Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, WSDM 2008, pp. 219–230. Association for Computing Machinery, New York (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Kingma, D.P., Ba, J.: Adam: a method for stochastic optimization. In: ICLR (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Li, A., Qin, Z., Liu, R., Yang, Y., Li, D.: Spam review detection with graph convolutional networks, pp. 2703–2711 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1145/3357384.3357820

  20. Lin, T.Y., Goyal, P., Girshick, R., He, K., Dollár, P.: Focal loss for dense object detection. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 42(2), 318–327 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1109/TPAMI.2018.2858826

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Lin, Y., Zhu, T., Wu, H., Zhang, J., Wang, X., Zhou, A.: Towards online anti-opinion spam: spotting fake reviews from the review sequence. In: 2014 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2014), pp. 261–264 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1109/ASONAM.2014.6921594

  22. Makki, S., Assaghir, Z., Taher, Y., Haque, R., Hacid, M.S., Zeineddine, H.: An experimental study with imbalanced classification approaches for credit card fraud detection. IEEE Access 7, 93010–93022 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2927266

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Mukherjee, A., Venkataraman, V., Liu, B., Glance, N.S.: What yelp fake review filter might be doing? In: Kiciman, E., Ellison, N.B., Hogan, B., Resnick, P., Soboroff, I. (eds.) Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, ICWSM 2013, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, 8–11 July 2013. The AAAI Press (2013). https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v7i1.14389

  24. Ren, Y., Ji, D.: Neural networks for deceptive opinion spam detection: an empirical study. Inf. Sci. 385–386, 213–224 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ins.2017.01.015

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Shehnepoor, S., Salehi, M., Farahbakhsh, R., Crespi, N.: NetSpam: a network-based spam detection framework for reviews in online social media. IEEE Trans. Inf. Forensics Secur. 12, 1585–1595 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1109/TIFS.2017.2675361

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Soliman, A., Girdzijauskas, S.: AdaGraph: adaptive graph-based algorithms for spam detection in social networks. In: El Abbadi, A., Garbinato, B. (eds.) NETYS 2017. LNCS, vol. 10299, pp. 338–354. Springer, Cham (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59647-1_25

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  27. Wang, G., Xie, S., Liu, B., Yu, P.S.: Identify online store review spammers via social review graph. ACM Trans. Intell. Syst. Technol. 3(4) (2012). https://doi.org/10.1145/2337542.2337546

  28. Xie, T., Grossman, J.C.: Crystal graph convolutional neural networks for an accurate and interpretable prediction of material properties. Phys. Rev. Lett. 120, 145301 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.145301

    Article  Google Scholar 

  29. Ying, R., He, R., Chen, K., Eksombatchai, P., Hamilton, W.L., Leskovec, J.: Graph convolutional neural networks for web-scale recommender systems. In: Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining, KDD 2018, pp. 974–983. Association for Computing Machinery, New York (2018). https://doi.org/10.1145/3219819.3219890

  30. Zhao, C., Xin, Y., Li, X., Zhu, H., Yang, Y., Chen, Y.: An attention-based graph neural network for spam bot detection in social networks. Appl. Sci. 10(22) (2020). https://doi.org/10.3390/app10228160

  31. Zhao, S., Xu, Z., Liu, L., Guo, M.: Towards accurate deceptive opinion spam detection based on word order-preserving CNN. Math. Probl. Eng. 2018 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1155/2018/2410206

Download references

Acknowledgments

The work of Giuseppina Andresini and Donato Malerba was supported by the project FAIR - Future AI Research (PE00000013), Spoke 6 - Symbiotic AI, under the NRRP MUR program funded by the NextGenerationEU. The work of Annalisa Appice was partially supported by project SERICS (PE00000014) under the NRRP MUR National Recovery and Resilience Plan funded by the European Union - NextGenerationEU. The authors wish to thank Raffaele Scaringi for the helpful discussion on Graph Neural Networks.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Giuseppina Andresini .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Ethics declarations

CRediT Authorship Contribution Statement

Giuseppina Andresini. Conceptualization, Methodology, Data curation, Investigation, Validation, Supervision, Visualization, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Annalisa Appice: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Validation, Supervision, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Roberto Gasbarro: Methodology, Software, Investigation, Data curation, Visualization, Writing - review & editing. Donato Malerba: Conceptualization, Writing - review & editing.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Andresini, G., Appice, A., Gasbarro, R., Malerba, D. (2023). GLORIA: A Graph Convolutional Network-Based Approach for Review Spam Detection. In: Bifet, A., Lorena, A.C., Ribeiro, R.P., Gama, J., Abreu, P.H. (eds) Discovery Science. DS 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 14276. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45275-8_8

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45275-8_8

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-45274-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-45275-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics