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

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Access rights
openAccess
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
A4 Artikkeli konferenssijulkaisussa
This publication is imported from Aalto University research portal.
View publication in the Research portal
View/Open full text file from the Research portal
Date
2018
Department
Department of Computer Science
Major/Subject
Mcode
Degree programme
Language
en
Pages
20
132-151
Series
Computer Security - 23rd European Symposium on Research in Computer Security, ESORICS 2018, Proceedings, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), Volume 11098 LNCS
Abstract
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 {\alpha} = 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.
Description
Keywords
security, Machine Learning, fraud detection, neural machine translation, social media, natural language
Other note
Citation
Juuti, M, Sun, B, Mori, T & Asokan, N 2018, Stay On-Topic : Generating Context-specific Fake Restaurant Reviews . in Computer Security - 23rd European Symposium on Research in Computer Security, ESORICS 2018, Proceedings . Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), vol. 11098 LNCS, Springer, pp. 132-151, European Symposium on Research in Computer Security, Barcelona, Spain, 03/09/2018 . https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99073-6_7