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Exposing collaborative spammer groups through the review-response graph

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Abstract

Deceptive opinions of online merchandises, also known as review spams, cause great loss for consumers, manufacturers and even business-to-customer platforms. However, due to the weak supervision problem, especially the lack of ground-truth labels, identifying these untruthful reviews is challenging. What’s even worse is that crowdsourcing workers out of manipulation campaigns always collaborate to distort an item’s reputation, rendering the product together with its brand difficult to be rehabilitated. State-of-the-art solutions on spammer group recognition highlight co-reviewing behaviours or sentiment similarity to cluster reviews, which can only yield loosely-coupled candidates of reviewer sets. In this paper, we highlight the commenting interaction between reviews and model it as a bipartite graph and discover a new low-budget spam, i.e., responsive spam. Furthermore, we recognize strong-correlated groups of spam through a propagation technique upon two widely adopted spam indicators, i.e., text duplication and posting burstiness. Comparative results show that our approach is effective and outperforms state-of-the-art solutions with great significance.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the National Nature Science Foundation of China, under grant 61801285 and 61802247.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electronic Information Engineering, Shanghai Dianji University, Shanghai, 201306, China

    Jiandun Li, Jingyi Hu, Pengpeng Zhang & Liu Yang

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  1. Jiandun Li
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  2. Jingyi Hu
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  3. Pengpeng Zhang
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  4. Liu Yang
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Correspondence to Jiandun Li.

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Li, J., Hu, J., Zhang, P. et al. Exposing collaborative spammer groups through the review-response graph. Multimed Tools Appl 82, 21687–21700 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-023-14650-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-023-14650-4

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