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Task one. Get ready to translate first three passages and to give a summary of the text. Software helps spot groups of fake online reviews
16 April 2012 Paul Marks
A couple of fake reviews probably won't kill (or unfairly promote) somebody's product/hotel/restaurant - but sustained postings of fake reviews by large groups of colluding opinion spammers might succeed. To the rescue come software engineers from the University of Illinois in Chicago and Google - who this week reveal a software algorithm that can pinpoint review threads in which groups of fraudsters are trying to wrest control of online sentiment.
In a paper to be delivered at this week's World Wide Web 2012 conference in Lyon, France,
Illinois researchers Arjun Mukherjee and Bing Liu, alongside Google's Natalie Glance, found the task easier than they expected thanks to the spammers' mob-handed behaviour. They hired eight online review experts from e-commerce sites eBay and Rediff and got them to assess the "spamicity" of 2400 English language reviews as being "spam", "borderline spam" or "non spam".
Unlike previous teams who have failed to make headway on this problem, they did not use Amazon's crowdsourcing machine, the Mechanical Turk, to use the general public to assess the reviews - preferring to use paid experts with a keen eye for a fake to improve accuracy.
They then trained software to spot the differences between how spammers and genuine writers write their reviews. Signature giveaways often included timing: spamming groups often file their "reviews" in quick bursts, the researchers say. And as the spammers are often briefed by a contracting agency working for a rival (for bad reviews) or the product maker/hotel/restaurant (for good reviews) each cod reviewer falls into the trap of using very similar language.
Such behaviour meant the groups who colluded to kill or hype products or businesses stuck out like sore thumbs. "Although labelling individual fake reviews and reviewers is very hard, to our surprise labelling fake reviewer groups is much easier," they write in their paper.
The work suggests that such fakes can be more easily deleted by moderators (or automatically) in future. And not before time: computer scientist Myle Ott, Claire Cardie and Jeff Hancock from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, will also be revealing at WWW2012 that in their survey of deceptive reviews on Expedia, Hotels.com, Orbitz, Priceline, TripAdvisor and Yelp the practice of fake reviews is "a growing problem overall".
However, they found opinion spam is growing less on sites where the hosts moderate reviews posted by first time reviewers - offering another weapon that sites can wield against fraud.
TASK TWO. Discuss the given abstract.
Google Drive Kicks Into Gear. After years of anticipation, Google has finally made its Google Drive cloud storage service available. The service will stow users' data remotely and allow access via desktop and mobile applications. Third-party developers are already working on apps that will incorporate Google Drive features. Users get 5 GB for free; more storage can be purchased on a monthly basis.
The service incorporates Google Docs and lets users upload, access and share their files, including videos, photos and PDFs. Google Drive works on Macs and PCs, and an Android app is available. An iOS app is in the works.