In addition
to the PIs, the following graduate students work on the project.
Technical Merits:
Given the critical issues of opinion fraud in online
communities, how can one identify fake reviews and attribute
responsible culprits behind them? By conjoining expertise of the
PIs over various modalities of deception footprints ranging over
language, user behavior, and relational information, this
project presents a research program that will result in much
needed solutions to this emergent, prevalent, and socially
impactful problem. The ultimate goal is to create a unified
detection framework via synergistic integration of multiple
information sources; from linguistics, user behavior, and
network effects, to obtain the best of all worlds. The main idea
is to formulate the problem as a relational inference task on
composite heterogeneous networks, providing a principled,
extensible approach that can blend and reinforce all the above
cues towards effective and robust detection of fraud. From a
scientific point of view, the research brings together three
disciplines: natural language analysis, behavioral modeling, and
graph mining. The outcome is a suite of novel, principled, and
scalable techniques and models that will enhance our
understanding of the creation and dissemination of opinion fraud
and misinformation in general at a large scale. The PIs will
collaborate with industry partners such as Yelp, Google, and
Amazon, directly solicit online fake reviews, and conduct
well-designed user studies for testing and validation of their
techniques.
Broader Impacts:
The broader impact of our work is that it will enable the
development of opinion fraud and misinformation detection
solutions that are critical in achieving integrity and
credibility on the Web. The outcome of this research will be
beneficial to billions of Web users, governments, law
enforcement agencies, multi-billion-dollar industries and
service providers. As such, the two main bodies that this
project will directly and significantly impact are the Web users
and the e-commerce site owners. The PIs will collaborate with
Yelp in evaluation and integration of their developed techniques
and tools. The PIs will further reach out to other industry
contacts at Amazon, Google, and TripAdvisor and aim to
disseminate research results to them through published
manuscripts and tutorials at major conferences where many
industry practitioners attend, as well as release publicly
available open-source software for opinion fraud detection. The
public will also be educated through reaching out to popular
press media for interviews and educational press articles.
