2012-04-11 Opinion Spam Detection - Bing Liu

Opinions from social media are increasingly used by individuals and organizations for making purchase decisions and making choices at elections and for marketing and product design. Positive opinions often mean profits and fames for businesses and individuals, which, unfortunately, give strong incentives for people to game the system by posting fake opinions or reviews to promote or to discredit some target products, services, organizations, individuals, and even ideas without disclosing their true intentions, or the person/organization that they are secretly working for. Such individuals are called opinion spammers and their activities are called opinion spamming. Opinion spamming about social and political issues can even be frightening as they can warp opinions and mobilize masses into positions counter to legal or ethical mores. It is safe to say that as opinions in social media are increasingly used in practice, opinion spamming will become more and more rampant and sophisticated, which presents a major challenge for their detection. However, they must be detected in order to ensure that the social media continues to be a trusted source of public opinions, rather than being full of fakes, lies, and deceptions. In this talk, I will use consumer reviews about products and services as an example to introduce this problem, and describe some current techniques for detecting fake reviews.

Bing Liu is a professor of Computer Science at University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). He received his PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh. Before joining UIC in 2002, he was with the National University of Singapore. His current research interests include opinion mining and sentiment analysis, opinion spam (e.g., fake reviews) detection, Web mining, and data mining. He has published extensively in leading conferences and journals in these fields. He has also written a textbook titled “Web Data Mining: Exploring Hyperlinks, Contents and Usage Data” published by Springer (two editions). On professional services, Liu has served as program chairs of ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), ACM Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM), SIAM Conference on Data Mining (SDM), ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), and Pacific Asia Conference on Data Mining (PAKDD). Additionally, he has served or is serving on the editorial boards of several leading journals, e.g., Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, ACM Transactions on the Web, and IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. He was also featured in a front page article of The New York Times on Jan 27, 2012 in relation to his work on fake review detection.

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