Deceptive reviews and sentiment polarity: Effective link by exploiting BERT

Today, reviews are the advertising medium par excellence through which companies are able to influence customers’ spending decisions. Although the initial purpose of reviews was to provide companies with a feedback tool to improve products and services based on customer needs, they soon became a way to climb the sales rankings, often illegally. In fact, deceptive and fake reviews have managed to evade the often non-existent means of validation of online platforms, proliferating a new business. To combat this phenomenon, several classification methods have been developed to train automated tools in the arduous task of distinguishing between genuine and misleading reviews, the most recent based on machine and deep learning techniques. This paper proposes a multi-label classification methodology based on the Google BERT neural language model to build a deceptive review detector aided by its sentiment awareness: improved modeling of the link between sentiment polarity and deceptiveness during the fine-tuning phase by exploiting the Binary Cross Entropy with Logits loss function adds to the advantages provided by pre-trained contextual models, which are able to capture word polysemy through word embeddings and benefit from pre-training on huge corpora. Tests were performed on the Deceptive Opinion Spam Corpus and Yelp New York City datasets, providing a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the results which, when compared with the state of the art available in the literature, showed an encouraging increase in performance. © 2022 Elsevier Ltd