• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.472-490
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• 2021

The detection of products with manipulated reviews has received widespread research attention, given that a truthful, informative, and useful review helps to significantly lower the search effort and cost for potential customers. This study proposes a method to recognize products with manipulated online customer reviews by examining the sequence of each review's sentiment, readability, and rating scores by product on randomness, considering the example of a Russian online retail site. Additionally, this study aims to examine the association between brand awareness and existing manipulation with products' reviews. Therefore, we investigated the difference between well-known and unknown brands' products online reviews with and without manipulated reviews based on the average star rating and the extremely positive sentiment scores. Consequently, machine learning techniques for predicting products are tested with manipulated reviews to determine a more useful one. It was found that about 20% of all product reviews are manipulated. Among the products with manipulated reviews, 44% are products of well-known brands, and 56% from unknown brands, with the highest prediction performance on deep neural network.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.28 no.4
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• pp.347-364
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• 2022

Fraudulent companies or sellers strategically manipulate reviews to influence customers' purchase decisions; therefore, the reliability of reviews has become crucial for customer decision-making. Since customers increasingly rely on online reviews to search for more detailed information about products or services before purchasing, many researchers focus on detecting manipulated reviews. However, the main problem in detecting manipulated reviews is the difficulties with obtaining data with manipulated reviews to utilize machine learning techniques with sufficient data. Also, the number of manipulated reviews is insufficient compared with the number of non-manipulated reviews, so the class imbalance problem occurs. The class with fewer examples is under-represented and can hamper a model's accuracy, so machine learning methods suffer from the class imbalance problem and solving the class imbalance problem is important to build an accurate model for detecting manipulated reviews. Thus, we propose an OpenAI-based reviews generation model to solve the manipulated reviews imbalance problem, thereby enhancing the accuracy of manipulated reviews detection. In this research, we applied the novel autoregressive language model - GPT-3 to generate reviews based on manipulated reviews. Moreover, we found that applying GPT-3 model for oversampling manipulated reviews can recover a satisfactory portion of performance losses and shows better performance in classification (logit, decision tree, neural networks) than traditional oversampling models such as random oversampling and SMOTE.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.29-39
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• 2020

Online communities, such as Internet portal sites and social media, have become popular since they allow users to share opinions and to obtain information anytime, anywhere. Accordingly, an increasing number of opinions are manipulated to the advantage of particular groups or individuals, and these opinions include falsified product reviews and political propaganda. Existing detection systems are built upon the characteristics of manipulated opinions for one particular time period. However, manipulation tactics change over time to evade detection systems and to more efficiently spread information, so detection systems should also evolve according to the changes. We therefore propose a system that helps observe and trace changes in manipulation tactics. This system classifies opinions into clusters that represent different tactics, and changes in these clusters reveal evolving tactics. We evaluated the system with over a million opinions collected during three election campaigns and found various changes in (i) the times when manipulations frequently occur, (ii) the methods to manipulate recommendation counts, and (iii) the use of multiple user IDs. We suggest that the operators of online communities perform regular audits with the proposed system to identify evolutions and to adjust detection systems.