journal article·2025-03-29Open access

Detecting Fake Reviews Using Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis and Graph Convolutional Networks

Prathana Phukon, Petros Potikas, Katerina Potika

Applied Sciences· Volume 15· Issue 7

Abstract

Online reviews significantly influence consumer behavior and business reputations. Detecting fake reviews is important for maintaining trust and integrity in these platforms. We present an aspect-based sentiment analysis approach, referred to as FakeDetectionGCN, to distinguish genuine feedback from deceptive content. The idea is to analyze sentiments related to specific aspects (features) within reviews. Graph convolutional networks are used to model the complex contextual dependencies in the review texts. Additionally, SenticNet, an external semantic resource, is integrated to enhance the understanding of sentiments in the reviews. This model is capable of identifying both human-generated (genuine) as well as computer-generated (fake) reviews. It has been evaluated on two types of datasets and has shown strong performance across both. Through this work, we contribute to the effective detection of fake reviews and maintaining a trustworthy online review ecosystem.
Source: crossref · Quality: baseline

Research context

OpenAlex topics: Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining · Spam and Phishing Detection · Misinformation and Its Impacts

SciVX discovery tags are terminology-based. OpenAlex topics are source-provided classifications.

Affiliations

Computer Science Department, San Jose State University, San Jose, CA 95192, USA

Electrical and Computer Engineering School, National Technical University of Athens, 15780 Athens, Greece

References (41)

Show source-provided references
1. Fake reviews detection: A survey10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3075573 ↗
2. Cao, C., Li, S., Yu, S., and Chen, Z. (2021, January 7–10). Fake reviewer group detection in online review systems. Proceedings of the 2021 International Conference on Data Mining Workshops (ICDMW), Auckland, New Zealand.10.1109/ICDMW53433.2021.00122 ↗
3. Liu, B., and Zhang, L. (2012). A survey of opinion mining and sentiment analysis. Mining Text Data, Springer.10.1007/978-1-4614-3223-4_13 ↗
4. Kipf, T.N., and Welling, M. (2016). Semi-supervised classification with graph convolutional networks. arXiv.
5. Pennington, J., Socher, R., and Manning, C. (2014, January 25–29). GloVe: Global Vectors for Word Representation. Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), Doha, Qatar.10.3115/v1/D14-1162 ↗
6. Devlin, J., Chang, M.W., Lee, K., and Toutanova, K. (2018, January 1–6). BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding. Proceedings of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), New Orleans, LA, USA.
7. Mikolov, T., Sutskever, I., Chen, K., Corrado, G.S., and Dean, J. (2013, January 5–8). Distributed representations of words and phrases and their compositionality. Proceedings of the Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26 (NIPS 2013), Lake Tahoe, NV, USA.
8. A comprehensive survey on sentiment analysis: Approaches, challenges and trends10.1016/j.knosys.2021.107134 ↗
9. Survey on aspect-level sentiment analysis10.1109/TKDE.2015.2485209 ↗
10. Aspect-based sentiment analysis via affective knowledge enhanced graph convolutional networks10.1016/j.knosys.2021.107643 ↗
11. Tang, D., Qin, B., and Liu, T. (2016). Aspect level sentiment classification with deep memory network. arXiv.10.18653/v1/D16-1021 ↗
12. Zhuang, L., Jing, F., and Zhu, X.Y. (2006, January 6–11). Movie review mining and summarization. Proceedings of the 15th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, Arlington, VA, USA.10.1145/1183614.1183625 ↗
13. Jakob, N., and Gurevych, I. (2010, January 9–11). Extracting opinion targets in a single and cross-domain setting with conditional random fields. Proceedings of the 2010 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Cambridge, MA, USA.
14. Wang, Y., Huang, M., Zhu, X., and Zhao, L. (2016, January 1–4). Attention-based LSTM for aspect-level sentiment classification. Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Austin, TX, USA.10.18653/v1/D16-1058 ↗
15. Tan, M., Santos, C.D., Xiang, B., and Zhou, B. (2015). Lstm-based deep learning models for non-factoid answer selection. arXiv.
16. Convolutional attention neural network over graph structures for improving the performance of aspect-level sentiment analysis10.1016/j.ins.2021.12.127 ↗
17. Sun, K., Zhang, R., Mensah, S., Mao, Y., and Liu, X. (2019, January 3–7). Aspect-level sentiment analysis via convolution over dependency tree. Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), Hong Kong, China.10.18653/v1/D19-1569 ↗
18. Cambria, E., Liu, Q., Decherchi, S., Xing, F., and Kwok, K. (2021, January 20–25). SenticNet 7: A Neural Network Approach to Enhance Sentiment Lexicons. Proceedings of the International Conference on Sentiment Analysis, Marseille, France.
19. A novel weight-oriented graph convolutional network for aspect-based sentiment analysis10.1007/s11227-022-04689-9 ↗
20. Mukherjee, A., Venkataraman, V., Liu, B., and Glance, N. (2013, January 8–11). What Yelp Fake Review Filter Might Be Doing?. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, Cambridge, MA, USA.
21. Fake It Till You Make It: Reputation, Competition, and Yelp Review Fraud10.1287/mnsc.2015.2304 ↗
22. Ott, M., Choi, Y., Cardie, C., and Hancock, J.T. (2011, January 19–24). Finding Deceptive Opinion Spam by Any Stretch of the Imagination. Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Portland, OR, USA.
23. Jindal, N., and Liu, B. (2008, January 11–12). Opinion Spam and Analysis. Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, Palo Alto, CA, USA.10.1145/1341531.1341560 ↗
24. Li, J., Ott, M., Cardie, C., and Hovy, E. (2020). Towards AI-Complete Question Answering: A Set of Prerequisite Toy Tasks. arXiv.
25. Intelligent fake reviews detection based on aspect extraction and analysis using deep learning10.1007/s00521-022-07531-8 ↗
26. Yu, S., Ren, J., Li, S., Naseriparsa, M., and Xia, F. (2022). Graph learning for fake review detection. Front. Artif. Intell., 5.10.3389/frai.2022.922589 ↗
27. An analysis of graph neural networks for fake review detection: A systematic literature review10.1016/j.neucom.2025.129341 ↗
28. Geetha, S., Elakiya, E., Kanmani, R.S., and Das, M.K. (2025). High performance fake review detection using pretrained DeBERTa optimized with Monarch Butterfly paradigm. Sci. Rep., 15.10.1038/s41598-025-89453-8 ↗
29. Long short-term memory10.1162/neco.1997.9.8.1735 ↗
30. Honnibal, M., and Montani, I. (2020). spaCy: Industrial-Strength Natural Language Processing in Python, Zenodo.
31. Blakely, D., Lanchantin, J., and Qi, Y. (2021). Time and space complexity of graph convolutional networks. Preprint, 31.
32. Scikit-Learn Developers (2024, April 29). Model Evaluation. Available online: https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/model_evaluation.html.
33. (2024, April 30). PyTorch. Available online: https://pytorch.org/.
34. Ott, M., Cardie, C., and Hancock, J. (2012, January 16–20). Estimating the prevalence of deception in online review communities. Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on World Wide Web, Lyon, France.10.1145/2187836.2187864 ↗
35. Creating and detecting fake reviews of online products10.1016/j.jretconser.2021.102771 ↗
36. Pontiki, M., Galanis, D., Pavlopoulos, J., Papageorgiou, H., Androutsopoulos, I., and Manandhar, S. (2014, January 23–24). SemEval-2014 Task 4: Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis. Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval 2014), Dublin, Ireland.10.3115/v1/S14-2004 ↗
37. Pontiki, M., Galanis, D., Papageorgiou, H., Manandhar, S., and Androutsopoulos, I. (2015, January 4–5). SemEval-2015 Task 12: Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis. Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval 2015), Denver, CO, USA.10.18653/v1/S15-2082 ↗
38. Pontiki, M., Galanis, D., Papageorgiou, H., Androutsopoulos, I., and Manandhar, S. (2016, January 16–17). SemEval-2016 Task 5: Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis. Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval 2016), San Diego, CA, USA.10.18653/v1/S16-1002 ↗
39. (2024, April 30). PyABSA Documentation. Available online: https://pyabsa.readthedocs.io/.
40. Rayana, S., and Akoglu, L. (2015, January 10–13). Collective opinion spam detection. Proceedings of the 21th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, Sydney, Australia.10.1145/2783258.2783370 ↗
41. Scikit-Learn Developers (2024, April 29). Supervised Learning. Available online: https://scikit-learn.org/stable/supervised_learning.html.