International Journal of Emerging Trends & Technology in Computer Science (IJETTCS)

Web Site: www.ijettcs.org Email: editor@ijettcs.org

Volume 3, Issue 6, November-December 2014

ISSN 2278-6856

A Survey on Detection of Shill Reviews by

Measuring its Linguistic Features
Sarika S. Nalawade1, Ms. S. S. Pawar2
Department of Computer Engineering D. Y. Patil College of Engineering
Savitribai Phule Pune University Pune, India

Abstract
With the increasing use of online shopping; e-commerce
websites have become targets of opinion spam. People can
now post their views using Internet forums, discussion groups,
product reviews and blogs, which are collectively called usergenerated contents. Scanning through large amounts of usergenerated content manually and checking its truthfulness is
time-consuming and sometime impossible. This study explores
the various types of linguistic features of shill reviews and
respected tools developed to extract product features from text
of product reviews. Sentiment analysis, Natural language
processing, Machine learning techniques and linguistic
features can be employed to detect the shill reviews. The main
objective of review spammers is to mislead users and change
their perception about particular product or service. Various
linguistic characteristics including styles of spamming can be
helpful to detect the review spam. Different methods
according to linguistic features have been adopted and
implemented effectively. Review manipulation was found on
reputable e-commerce websites, so linguistic-feature based
methods have gained popularity.

Keywords:- Shill reviews, Informativeness, Readability,

Linguistic features, Subjectivity

1. INTRODUCTION
Many people rate, review and research products online.
Consumers use product reviews as a media to gather
information about the service, quality and performance of
products. The product information given in reviews
usually comes from actual users of the product. These
reviews can be helpful for consumers in decision making
of buying that product. Due to this, review spammers get
an opportunity to manipulate review system to mislead the
consumers and change their perception about specific
product. Fake reviews are also referred as Shill reviews,
or Opinion spam. Opinion spam can be deceptive or
disruptive [1].
Deceptive reviews mislead readers by giving
undeserving positive reviews to some target objects in
order to promote the objects; or by giving unfair
negative reviews to some target object in order to
damage their reputation.
Disruptive reviews are non-reviews, which mainly
include advertisements and other irrelevant reviews
containing no opinion.
Following are some facts about consumers behaviour and
approach towards online shopping.

Volume 3, Issue 6, November-December 2014

97% of people, who made a purchase based on an

online review, found the review to be correct.
75% of people don't trust that companies tell the truth
in Advertisements.
70% of people consult reviews or ratings before
purchasing anything online.
51% of people use the Internet even before making a
purchase in shops.[15]

2. APPROACHES TO DETECT SHILL REVIEWS

Previous work mainly uses rating score and the feedback
score as indicator to detect the spam reviews. Researchers
have devised methods to detect shill reviews on the basis
of sentiment score, by studying features of review spam
and on the basis of machine learning techniques [1]. Some
work has been also done on the rating behavior of review
spammers [2].
2.1. Sentiment Analysis
Past studies utilized rating as indicator for the detection,
but ignored the problem that rating alone cannot represent
sentiment accurately. Sentiment analysis aims to detect
subjectivity in opinion and determines the attitude of the
opinion holder. It gives the polarity of opinion being
positive or negative. It can be incorporated in task of shill
review detection; as it aims to decide the polarity of
reviews. Machine learning techniques combined with
sentiment classification can give promising results for
classifying travel blogs, movie reviews, etc accurately [3].
2.2. Linguistic Features
Effective detection of fake reviews can be done by
studying the linguistic features for product reviews. Some
of the features used in linguistic analysis are listed below:
2.2.1. Informativeness
Informativeness is defined as, the amount of product
information provided in a review. Product information is
represented by product features mentioned in a review. An
official feature is a noun or a noun phrase about the
product; which is included in the official product
description. Un-official features are not part of the product
description.
2.2.2. Readability
Readability is usually measured by the length of the text,
the complexity of the words and number of sentences used
in the review. Deceptive reviews contain more complex
words, and making them less readable than genuine ones.
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International Journal of Emerging Trends & Technology in Computer Science (IJETTCS)

Web Site: www.ijettcs.org Email: editor@ijettcs.org
Volume 3, Issue 6, November-December 2014
To identify most helpful reviews, readability and structure
analysis can be useful.
2.2.3. Subjectivity
Subjectivity analysis is to classify a sentence into one of
the two classes: objective and subjective. Positive and
negative polarity of sentences can be extracted by
measuring subjectivity of review.
2.2.4. Writing Style
In order to reflect the opinions, spammers use their
specific writing style to construct sentences. Stylometry is
an important feature for security researchers as it is a
forensic technique that helps to detect authorship of
unknown documents.
2.3. Machine Learning Techniques
Supervised machine learning techniques are used to
predict the possible outcome, when training set of
particular data is available. Machine learning classifiers
like Nave-bayes, Support Vector Machine (SVM),
Artificial Neural Network (ANN), Logistic Regression,
Maximum Entropy Model (MEM), etc. have been used to
detect deceptive opinion spam.
3. LITERATURE REVIEW
Peng et al. [4] used an approach of sentiment analysis to
detect spam reviews. The work has been done by
computing sentiment score from the natural language text
by using a shallow dependency parser. Then the
relationship between sentiment score and spam reviews is
discussed. By studying the observations and combining
the time series, discriminative rules are established.
Experimental results show that, the proposed method has
good detection results and outperformed existing methods.
Ziqiong Zhang et al. [3] have also used sentiment analysis
approach. By integrating machine learning techniques and
sentiment classification, it can give better results for
classifying travel blogs, movie reviews, etc precisely.
Ong et al. [5] have studied various linguistic
characteristics of shill reviews, like informativeness,
subjectivity, readability etc. A tool has been developed for
extracting product features from the text of the product
reviews. This study provides improved understanding of
shill reviews and demonstrates a method to extract and
classify features from product reviews; which helps to
increase effectiveness of review filtering methods.
Banerjee et al. [6] developed a framework to distinguish
between genuine and deceptive online reviews. Their
proposed system was based on the linguistic features of
deceptive reviews like readability, genre and writing style.
The evaluation results showed readability and writing
style of reviews could be more significant to distinguish
between genuine and deceptive comments. Michael P.
O'Mahony et al. [7] addressed the problems in context of
user generated product reviews. Authors developed a
review classification technique that seeks to automatically
identify the most helpful reviews from many that are
frequently submitted for the products. The focus of study
was on features relating to the structure and readability of
review texts, and examines the classification performance
provided by these features. Jindal et al. [2] identified
several characteristic behaviours of review spammers and

Volume 3, Issue 6, November-December 2014

ISSN 2278-6856

modelled these behaviours to detect the spammers.

Scoring methods was proposed to measure the degree of
spam for each reviewer and apply them on an Amazon
review dataset. Choi et al. [8] integrated psychology and
computational linguistics. They developed and compared
three approaches to detect deceptive opinion spam, and
developed a classifier that gives high accuracy on goldstandard opinion spam dataset. Fan et al. [9] devised
Statistical Opinion Analyzer (SOA) that extracts the
polarity of online customer reviews using Nave bayes
classifier and frequency distribution. This application
helps a new customer to purchase the product and select
manufacturer to enhance the product's functionality. First,
Reviews were crawled then pre-processed by GO tagger
and inserted in SOA to find the positive and negative
opinion probability with frequency distribution. This
application gives promising results. Tian et al. [10]
devised a model on Vietnamese reviews of mobile phones.
Synonym feature words were grouped by using HAC
clustering and semi-SVMkNN classification. Opinion
words along with weights have been used to extract
feature words using pre-constructed adjective words and
VietSentiWordNet. Then, positive, negative and neutral
polarities have been extracted, which is based on the
weights and are used for opinion orientation. Zhang et al.
[11] used Syntax Based Pattern (SBP) used to enhance the
subjective feature extraction from text. Syntax based
pattern based on four types of words- adverb, adjective,
verbs and nouns. Linguistic features are extracted using
syntactic information and Maximum Entropy Model
(MEM) Classifier has been applied to find out objective
and subjective sentences. Zhan et al. [12] has done
comparison between ANN and SVM classifiers in
sentiment classification of customer reviews. Evaluation
results showed that ANN classifier is more promising to
apply on movie reviews than SVM classifier.
4. METHODS
To measure the linguistic features, some methods have
been adopted and implemented efficiently.
4.1. Description Based Feature Extraction Method
(DFEM) for determining informativeness
Due to the quantity of the reviews, and the need for
constant classification of features, the Description Based
Feature Extraction Method (DFEM) was devised to extract
and classify product features from text comments. DFEM
combines existing text mining tools to identify and
classify features in product reviews. The results
demonstrate that DFEM is an effective method for
detecting both official and un-official features in product
reviews.
4.2. Index measure for determining readability
Readability has been used in prior studies to predict the
usefulness. Five popular readability index measures are
explained below:
4.2.1. The Fog Index
The value range of the Fog Index is from 1 to 12. A lower
Fog Index means more readable text. The Fog Index of
each review can be calculated as follow:
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International Journal of Emerging Trends & Technology in Computer Science (IJETTCS)

Web Site: www.ijettcs.org Email: editor@ijettcs.org
Volume 3, Issue 6, November-December 2014
words
complex_ words

Fog 0.4 *
100*
(1)
N (words)
sentences
4.2.2. The Flesch Kincaid or Flesch Reading Ease
Index
The value of this index is from 0 to 100, smaller scores
indicating less readable text.

N(words
N(syllables
)
)
84.6*
(2)
FK 206.8551.015*
)
)
N(sentences
N(words
4.2.3. The Automated Readability Index (ARI)
The value of this index is from 1 to 12, number indicates
the grade level education needed to understand the text.
For example, ARI = 5 requires the reader to have fifth
grade education to understand the text. ARI can be
calculated as follow:

N(characters
N(words
)
)
0.5
21.43 (3)
ARI 4.71*
)
)
N(words
N(sentences
4.2.4. The Colemon-Liau Index (CLI)
The CLI ranges from 1 to 16 indicating the grade level
education needed to understand the text.
CLI = 0.0588L - 0.296S - 15.8
(4) L:
number of characters per 100 words.
S: number of sentences per 100 words
4.2.5. Simple measure of Gobbledygook (SMOG)
A SMOG result also ranges from 1 to 12. SMOG is
calculated as follow:
SMOG 1.043 30

Quantityof polysyllables
3.1291
Quantityof sentences

(5)

4.3. Shingling
Main tasks of shingling are:
4.3.1. Review Pre-processing
It takes extracted reviews as input stored in the raw
review database, and removes stop words, special
characters, punctuations and delimiters occurring in the
extracted reviews.
4.3.2. Feature Extraction
Shingling technique extracts the features from the reviews
stored in raw review database, and stores it in
Shingle_Feature_Database Sfd.
4.3.3. Create shingles
In case of shingling technique, each review is viewed as a
sequence of tokens, which could be words, or lines.
4.3.4. Spam_Detect_shingle
Shingles computed of the review documents is the input to
this component, where spam and the non-spam reviews is
detected using w-shingling algorithm
5. EXISTING SYSTEMS
The work on shill review detection has been done in
various fields by applying efficient techniques. Some of
the systems are explained below.
5.1. OPINE
This is an information extraction system which mines
reviews in order to construct a model of important product
features, their evaluation by reviewers, and their relative
quality across products. This framework helps to identify
product features with improved precision compared with

Volume 3, Issue 6, November-December 2014

ISSN 2278-6856

previous work. OPINE uses a new relaxation-labelling

technique to determine the semantic orientation of
potential opinion words in the context of the extracted
product features and specific review sentences. OPINE
extracts potential opinion phrases, differentiates between
opinions and non opinions, and finds the polarity of each
opinion regarding its feature in a targeted review sentence
or phrase. This technique allows the system to spot
customer opinions and their polarity with high precision
and recall [13].
5.2. Linguistic Framework
This framework has been developed to distinguish their
readability, genre and writing style. Framework implies
that genuine and deceptive reviews can be distinguished
based on their readability and writing style [6]. The
differences between genuine and deceptive reviews with
six POS tags: adjectives, articles, nouns, prepositions,
adverbs and pronouns, were not mathematically
significant. Informative texts normally contain more
adjectives, articles, nouns and prepositions, on other hand,
imaginative texts seem to be richer in adverbs and
pronouns. Research suggests that genuine reviews are
considered informative whereas deceptive reviews are
deemed imaginative. Finally it is observed that readability
and writing style of reviews could be significant linguistic
cues to distinguish between genuine and deceptive
comments.
5.3. SPAR
This system aims to detect the spam opinions in the
Yahoo!-Maktoob social network. The system developed
for Arabic opinion spam which reads the opinions and
classifies them into high levels spam and low level spam,
based on special metrics. SPAR algorithm is constructed
by adopting SVM classifier. The SPAR classifies each
non-spam opinion into one of the three classes- positive,
negative, and neutral, based on the language polarity
dictionaries. Proposed systems can be used effectively for
the internet portals to filter out some of the comments
posted through their portals.
5.4. Author Spamicity Model (ASM)
Existing methods greatly depend on heuristics and/or adhoc labels to detect opinion spam. Author Spamicity
Model has its basis in the theoretic foundation of
probabilistic model based clustering. This model works on
the principle of Bayesian theorem, which facilitates
modelling spamicity of authors as latent and allows
exploiting various observed behavioural footprints of
reviewers. It also enables detection and posterior density
analysis in a single framework.
6. COMPARISON OF SYSTEMS
Table 1: Comparison of Linguistic-feature based shill
review detection approaches:
Model
Linguistic
characteristics
of shill reviews

Feature
Informativeness
,
Subjectivity,
Readability

Comments
Informativeness
reflects knowledge
about product feature
Subjectivity reflects

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International Journal of Emerging Trends & Technology in Computer Science (IJETTCS)

Web Site: www.ijettcs.org Email: editor@ijettcs.org
Volume 3, Issue 6, November-December 2014
personal assessment
Readability hints to
detect deception
Linguistic
Framework to
distinguish
between
genuine and
deceptive online
reviews
Detecting
hoaxes, frauds,
and deception
in writing style
online
Spotting
opinion
spammers using
behavioural
footprints
Detecting
product review
spammers using
rating
Behaviours

Readability,
Genre,
Writing style

Readability and
writing style of
reviews
more significant

Writing style

Identification of
fraud authors with
high accuracy

Behavioural
footprints

Effective and
outperforms strong
competitors.

Rating
behaviours

More significant
impact on ratings
compared with the
unhelpful reviewers.

7. CONCLUSION
Shill reviews is an emerging problem of online review
systems. A successful shill attack might trick consumers
into buying low quality products or damage sales of
competing products. In addition, shill attacks that are
detected by consumers might result in loss of trust in
reputation of the systems and movement of consumers
away from electronic marketplaces. Therefore, a powerful
shill review detection method is essential for online
marketplaces moving forward. The occurrence of review
manipulation has the potential to undermine the
effectiveness of reputation systems. This paper surveys the
approaches used in detection of shill reviews. Then the
methods for particular approach are studied which
includes DFEM, readability index measures. Then some
linguistic feature based systems are explained briefly.
Then the comparative analysis is given to throw light on
specific linguistic features. Finally, analysis of linguistic
feature based methods is done on informativeness,
readability, stylometry and rating behaviour level.

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