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Stay On-Topic: Generating Context-Specific Fake Restaurant Reviews (arxiv.org)
1 point by walterbell on May 8, 2018 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A translation-based generator writes fake reviews that stick to one specific restaurant, where the older character-by-character writer often drifted off-topic. In tests, people failed to spot these fakes far more often, evading detection 3.2 out of 4 times versus 1.5.

Abstract · Stay On-Topic: Generating Context-specific Fake Restaurant Reviews

Automatically generated fake restaurant reviews are a threat to online review systems. Recent research has shown that users have difficulties in detecting machine-generated fake reviews hiding among real restaurant reviews. The method used in this work (char-LSTM ) has one drawback: it has difficulties staying in context, i.e. when it generates a review for specific target entity, the resulting review may contain phrases that are unrelated to the target, thus increasing its detectability. In this work, we present and evaluate a more sophisticated technique based on neural machine translation (NMT) with which we can generate reviews that stay on-topic. We test multiple variants of our technique using native English speakers on Amazon Mechanical Turk. We demonstrate that reviews generated by the best variant have almost optimal undetectability (class-averaged F-score 47%). We conduct a user study with skeptical users and show that our method evades detection more frequently compared to the state-of-the-art (average evasion 3.2/4 vs 1.5/4) with statistical significance, at level α = 1% (Section 4.3). We develop very effective detection tools and reach average F-score of 97% in classifying these. Although fake reviews are very effective in fooling people, effective automatic detection is still feasible.

Mika Juuti, Bo Sun, Tatsuya Mori, N. Asokan
arXiv:1805.02400 · cs.CR, cs.CL · submitted May 7, 2018 · updated Jun 28, 2018
abstract · pdf · html · 21 pages, 5 figures, 6 tables. Accepted for publication in the European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS) 2018

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