Evaluation of AI Techniques for Detecting Deceptive Reviews in Cyberspace: A Study of Pre- and Post-COVID-19 Trends

With cyberspace’s continuous evolution, online reviews play a crucial role in determining business success in various sectors, ranging from restaurants and hotels to e-commerce applications. Typically, a favorable review for a specific product draws in more consumers and results in a significant boost in sales. Unfortunately, a few businesses are using deceptive methods to improve their online reputation by using fake reviews of competitors. As a result, detecting fake reviews has become a difficult and ever-changing research field. Verbal characteristics extracted from review text, as well as nonverbal features such as the reviewer’s engagement metrics, the IP address of the device, and so on, play an important role in detecting fake reviews. This article examines and compares various machine learning techniques for detecting deceptive reviews on various online platforms such as e-commerce websites such as Amazon and online review websites such as Yelp, among others.