Graph-Aware Deep Fusion Networks for Online Spam Review Detection

Product reviews on e-commerce platforms play a critical role in shaping users' purchasing decisions. Unfortunately, online reviews sometimes can be intentionally misleading to manipulate the ecosystem. To date, existing methods to automatically detect "spam reviews" either focus on sophisticated feature engineering with traditional classification models or rely on tuning neural networks with aggregated features. In this article, we develop a novel graph-based model, namely, graph-aware deep fusion networks (GDFNs) that use information from relevant metadata (review text, features of users, and items) and relational data (network) to capture the semantic information from their complex heterogeneous interactions via graph convolutional networks (GCNs). Besides, GDFN also uses a novel fusion technique to synthesize low- and high-order interactions with propagated information across multiple review-related subgraphs. Extensive experiments on publicly available datasets show that our proposed model is effective and outperforms several strong state-of-the-art baselines.