URI professor looks to unmask fake reviews

STAR SYSTEM: URI professor Yan Lindsay Sun, center, has developed a prototype software to identify suspicious online reviews. At left in photo is Yihai Zhu and at right Yongbo Zeng, both URI Ph.D. candidates. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO
STAR SYSTEM: URI professor Yan Lindsay Sun, center, has developed a prototype software to identify suspicious online reviews. At left in photo is Yihai Zhu and at right Yongbo Zeng, both URI Ph.D. candidates. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO

TripAdvisor, an online site for all things travel, has 132 reviews posted for Nick’s on Broadway in Providence. The comments range from “exquisite and elegant” to “mediocre” and “yummy brunch – worth the wait.”
Nick’s has 374 reviews on Yelp and 378 reviews on Urban Spoon, two other popular online sites among a growing number that allow the public to give opinions on where to eat, drink, sleep, buy, fly, drive or do almost anything else. “There’s also Chowhound,” said owner and chef Derek Wagner, who opened Nick’s on Broadway in 2002, when fewer customers came in specifically as a result of online reviews. “There are so many different sites out there; it’s hard to keep up with it.
“I believe when it started, there was a lot of good in it. But there’s a lot of dirty laundry airing out there that can be hurtful,” said Wagner.
And often there’s little guarantee that the reviews are even genuine. That mystery bothers University of Rhode Island professor of computer engineering Yan Sun, who has a patent pending on technology that detects patterns of suspicious behavior in online rating-review systems.
Sun and a few graduate students have been working on developing technology to find fake reviews since 2007, funded by a $400,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.
The prototype has been developed and they’re determined to have it available for a pilot program.
“We’re not going to sell it. We want to make it free to the public,” said Sun. “We want to make it available by the beginning of November, before Black Friday and Cyber Monday, so consumers can have some help in making their purchasing decisions during the holidays.”
Sun’s own experiences doing much of her shopping online intersects with her interest in the issue of trust.
“In social sciences, trust is really important in any society,” said Sun. “If there’s a high level of trust, the society works more efficiently.” In business, trust has traditionally been an important element for success, where loyalty to a shop or a brand was sometimes passed down through generations.
The explosion of e-commerce hasn’t done away establishing trusting business relationships, it just adds a layer of complexity, or you might call it mystery, or uncertainty.
“Trust really benefits e-commerce,” said Sun. “If I want to purchase a camera, I go to Amazon and see the reviews. I really rely on them. I want to know if the camera is good or not.”
It’s the stories, the suggestions, the possible deceit and fakery that led Sun to crystallize her project, “Building Trust in Distributed Networks: Theory, Architecture and Applications,” that’s been awarded the NSF grant.
“I found out there are many stories. If you’re a hotel owner, for example, and you have competitors in a city, the reviews could be from the owner of the hotel or competitors,” said Sun.
Hotels reviews are one of the topics of most concern to Sun because travelers often visit a city one time and if the hotel doesn’t match the online reviews, the visitor often can’t change lodging plans on short notice.
Sun’s expertise in cybersecurity gives her research on honesty and trust in networks a broad reach.
“I started working on security issues in wireless networks. So when we borrow ideas from social science, we look at concepts related to the security of network components – the computer, router, devices – anything you can connect,” said Sun.
“If you go to a coffee shop and you use the free Wi-Fi, you see the name of the network for customers,” said Sun. The Wi-Fi is free, but the customer can’t know for sure if the router is set up by the coffee shop or by hackers. “There are services where you can boost your online image, you can hire a company,” said Sun. “If a business posts a YouTube video, it’s possible to hire a company to create fake clicks to provide a positive ratings review.”
It is possible to get interface data from e-commerce websites, to get more information on the source of the clicking, but that’s not readily available, she said.
Even with all the uncertainly about the real people, or not-so-honest people, behind online reviews, David Benton, general manager of Hotel Providence and its Aspire restaurant, looks on the positive side.
“I think those reviews, by far, are mostly accurate. If there’s one that may be a little suspect, I think it’s relatively rare,” said Benton. “Considering how many reviews are written every day and every year, I’d estimate it’s less than 1 percent that are fake.”
Benton does interact with people posting reviews about the hotel or restaurant.
“The only ability I have is to answer the guest,” said Benton, who responds “religiously” and personally to the comments, usually within 24 hours.
While Benton has general confidence in TripAdvisor, it is one site that Sun is concerned about.
“TripAdvisor has fake rating reviews,” said Sun. “You cannot know which one is fake.”
TripAdvisor spokeswoman Brooke Ferencsik responded in an email to Providence Business News: “TripAdvisor focuses a lot of attention on making sure that the reviews and content on the site are truly an accurate reflection of what travelers will find. In fact, when we ask our travelers about their experience with TripAdvisor reviews, 95 percent say that the reviews accurately reflect the trip they took.
“We fight fraud aggressively,” she continued. “Every single review goes through a tracking system and we map the how, what, where and when of each review.” •

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