5
Can you spot the fake reviews?
It seems that sites like Yelp are getting less and less useful.
Whenever I'm searching online for a new Indian restaurant or a hotel I'm hit with these insane pairings -- one review raves the other talks about roaches.
Online consumer reviews are everywhere. But how do you know if the review you're reading is real? Was it written by an unbiased, unpaid consumer? How can you be sure it wasn't written by the business owner's cousin or, maybe, her fiercest competitor?
Now researchers at Cornell say they have found an answer. Myle Ott, Jeff Hancock, Claire Cardie, and Yejin Choi teamed up to build software that can spot a fake review automatically 90 percent of the time. Real people fare much, much more poorly. Actual human beings are able to distinguish between a fake and real reviews just 50 percent of the time.
Think you can do better? Take the quiz below and see if you can spot the fakes.
Steve - I just came across this website with my name on it and a fake review with my name! What I noticed is that the company is putting up reviews based on actual customers but they are all fake - see the lack of comments. Hopefully someone can do something about this:
Both.
It the radio report the researcher said they got 70 percent accuracy simply by analyzing the parts of speach the writer used.
The software became more accurate when it added in other data to it's algorithm.
So sorry. Good point. I didn't want to give everything away before our little quiz.
But If you listen to the show for the day we answered you questions on the air.
I'm paraphrasing here - but fake reviews tend to use more active verbs. The fakes also are more likely to create a narrative about the trip itself - shifting the focus away from the hotel. In short they read more like fiction.
The real reviews are more likely to focus on details about the room or specifics about the hotel.
Here's the link. The fake review story is at the end.
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2011/07/28/tech-report-ti...
