Michela Fazzolari

Michela Fazzolari, Francesco Buccafurri, Gianluca Lax et al.

Over the last years, online reviews became very important since they can influence the purchase decision of consumers and the reputation of businesses, therefore, the practice of writing fake reviews can have severe consequences on customers and service providers. Various approaches have been proposed for detecting opinion spam in online reviews, especially based on supervised classifiers. In this contribution, we start from a set of effective features used for classifying opinion spam and we re-engineered them, by considering the Cumulative Relative Frequency Distribution of each feature. By an experimental evaluation carried out on real data from Yelp.com, we show that the use of the distributional features is able to improve the performances of classifiers.

Michela Fazzolari, Marinella Petrocchi, Alessandro Tommasi et al.

In this paper, we propose a novel approach for aggregating online reviews, according to the opinions they express. Our methodology is unsupervised - due to the fact that it does not rely on pre-labeled reviews - and it is agnostic - since it does not make any assumption about the domain or the language of the review content. We measure the adherence of a review content to the domain terminology extracted from a review set. First, we demonstrate the informativeness of the adherence metric with respect to the score associated with a review. Then, we exploit the metric values to group reviews, according to the opinions they express. Our experimental campaign has been carried out on two large datasets collected from Booking and Amazon, respectively.