Unmasking Falsehoods in Reviews: An Exploration of NLP Techniques

Abstract: In the contemporary digital landscape, online reviews have become an indispensable tool for promoting products and services across various businesses. Marketers, advertisers, and online businesses have found incentives to create deceptive positive reviews for their products and negative reviews for their competitors' offerings. As a result, the writing of deceptive reviews has become an unavoidable practice for businesses seeking to promote themselves or undermine their rivals. Detecting such deceptive reviews has become an intense and ongoing area of research. This research paper proposes a machine learning model to identify deceptive reviews, with a particular focus on restaurants. This study delves into the performance of numerous experiments conducted on a dataset of restaurant reviews known as the Deceptive Opinion Spam Corpus. To accomplish this, an n-gram model and max features are developed to effectively identify deceptive content, particularly focusing on fake reviews. A benchmark study is undertaken to explore the performance of two different feature extraction techniques, which are then coupled with five distinct machine learning classification algorithms. The experimental results reveal that the passive aggressive classifier stands out among the various algorithms, showcasing the highest accuracy not only in text classification but also in identifying fake reviews. Moreover, the research delves into data augmentation and implements various deep learning techniques to further enhance the process of detecting deceptive reviews. The findings shed light on the efficacy of the proposed machine learning approach and offer valuable insights into dealing with deceptive reviews in the realm of online businesses.