Detecting opinion spams and fake news using text classification
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent years, deceptive content such as fake news and fake reviews, also known as opinion spams, have increasingly become a dangerous prospect for online users. Fake reviews have affected consumers and stores alike. Furthermore, the problem of fake news has gained attention in 2016, especially in the aftermath of the last U.S. presidential elections. Fake reviews and fake news are a closely related phenomenon as both consist of writing and spreading false information or beliefs. The opinion spam problem was formulated for the first time a few years ago, but it has quickly become a growing research area due to the abundance of user‐generated content. It is now easy for anyone to either write fake reviews or write fake news on the web. The biggest challenge is the lack of an efficient way to tell the difference between a real review and a fake one; even humans are often unable to tell the difference. In this paper, we introduce a new n‐gram model to detect automatically fake contents with a particular focus on fake reviews and fake news. We study and compare 2 different features extraction techniques and 6 machine learning classification techniques. Experimental evaluation using existing public datasets and a newly introduced fake news dataset indicate very encouraging and improved performances compared to the state‐of‐the‐art methods.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".