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New Algorithm Recognizes Both Good and Bad Fake Reviews (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers from the university of Sao Paolo have developed an algorithm able to identify both good and bad online reviews in the massive daily chatter of millions of peer-community posts, and in lateral mendacities at social network sites such as Google+ and Facebook reposts and 'likes'. Two of the datasets tested in the research were from Amazon, which has a vested interest in restoring the reputation of its community reviews, and has recently taken action on the matter.
While I have spent a lot of time studying algorithms, I still like to look for new algorithms from time to time. This algorithm is definitely one of the better algorithms I have come across in my life.
When I first started studying the algorithm, I wasn't sure whether it was for me. However, after the first few pages, the algorithm began to grab my attention, and soon I was finding its average and worst case complexity and formally proving the correctness of several subroutines. I was astounded to find that it was at least as good as all the other algorithms I'd found over my twenty years' experience.
While I wouldn't recommend this algorithm to a beginner without guidance, the journeyman will soon find themselves reaching master by applying this algorithm. The master cannot fail to learn something new from it.
Just return true all the time. Sure there will be a few false positives but not enough to throw the results off by much.
It combines orgasmic whitefish essences and loud mustard overtones with a stale nacho aftertaste.
Why can't we just have moderation? Most of the poor (low quality, as opposed to negative) reviews are easy to spot; knuckleheads that break things two seconds after they get it out of the package; half the things they buy are mysteriously "DOA." Moderation enables your smart customers to punish your idiot customers.
Just spotted one of these today on eham.net. A beautiful hand made band pass filter rated 4.2/5 instead of the 5/5 it deserves because — years ago — some moron used it on the wrong band for the wrong purpose and rated it 0/5.
I thought that was what the "Was this review helpful to you? YES/NO/Report Abuse" options were for?
Effective community policing needs an involved community like slashdot. Even here, where nobody's trying to sell you anything other than an opinion, the sock-puppet modding can get out of hand sometimes...
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
Don't worry Amazon is just interest in rebuilding the 'reputation' of their reviews and not in the actual real genuiness or accuracy of the reviews, they just want to believe the reviews and buy junk. So they are basically engaging in a public relations exercise to give their reviews a positive review because so many people have given up on IMDB because the publicly accepted default review is a 10 out of 10 by a one off 'er' reviewer, so bad that it IMDB unusable as a movie review system. Basically skip the first bunch of pages (seriously up to and over 10 pages) as PR bullshit to get to real actual reviews.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen