Mining Weak Relations Between Reviews for Opinion Spam Detection

Online reviews play a significant role in purchase decisions of consumers by providing feedback information from buyers of products. In order to mislead consumers, opinion spammers are hired to write fake reviews to promote or demote specific products for illegitimate benefits. Existing methods for spam review detection mainly focused on designing manual features, which highly rely on expert knowledge. Although recent works utilized deep learning methods to automatically learn the semantics of reviews through the inherent user-review-product strong relation, they fail to capture the weak relations between reviews at the content, sentiment and temporal levels, which provides various semantic information to expose fake reviews. Moreover, the imbalanced class distribution in spam detection issues makes this work even more challenging. To address the above problems, we propose a novel Weak-Strong Unified Network (WSUN) for opinion spam detection. Multi-level weak relation graphs are constructed to reveal the abnormal behavioral patterns of spammers, which aggregates the semantics of strong relations by graph convolutional networks and extracts comprehensive review representation by utilizing relation-level attention mechanism. In addition, a graph-based over-sampling method is devised to mitigate the impact of imbalanced class distribution. Extensive experimental results on real-world datasets show that our model is more effective than the state-of-the-art methods.