Welcome to Journal of University of Chinese Academy of Sciences,Today is
Electronics & Computer Science

Fake review identification for online products based on clustering fine-tuning

  • Jinhao LIU ,
  • Pei QUAN ,
  • Wen ZHANG
Expand
  • College of Economics and Management,Beijing University of Technology,Beijing 100124,China

Received date: 2024-08-20

  Revised date: 2025-04-01

  Online published: 2025-04-16

Abstract

Fake reviews affect online consumers’purchasing decisions. Efficiently identifying fake reviews is a pressing issue in the current development of e-commerce. Traditional methods for detecting fake reviews are often influenced by variations in review text style, syntax, and context, resulting in lower accuracy. Although large language models (LLMs) can address this accuracy issue, their training process is typically time-consuming. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel method called CF-DRI (cluster-based fine-tuning for deceptive review identification). This method fine-tunes the pre-trained knowledge of LLMs by selecting clustered review samples, significantly enhancing the training efficiency for fake review identification. Compared to traditional methods, CF-DRI demonstrates superior performance with fewer fine-tuning samples. Experimental results on the Yelp.com dataset show that CF-DRI achieves a precision of 92.29% and a recall of 90.03% in fake review identification using only 20% of the clustered samples. This research provides new perspectives and solutions for managing fake reviews on e-commerce platforms, potentially promoting healthy industry development.

Cite this article

Jinhao LIU , Pei QUAN , Wen ZHANG . Fake review identification for online products based on clustering fine-tuning[J]. Journal of University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, 2026 , 43(2) : 230 -239 . DOI: 10.7523/j.ucas.2025.014

References

[1] Paul H, Nikolaev A. Fake review detection on online E-commerce platforms: a systematic literature review[J]. Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery202135(5): 1830-1881. DOI: 10.1007/s10618-021-00772-6 .
[2] Gupta P, Gandhi S, Chakravarthi B R. Leveraging transfer learning techniques- BERT, RoBERTa, ALBERT and DistilBERT for fake review detection[C]//Proceedings of the 13th Annual Meeting of the Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation. December 13 - 17, 2021, Virtual Event, India. ACM, 2021: 75-82. DOI: 10.1145/3503162.3503169 .
[3] Mohawesh R, Xu S X, Tran S N, et al. Fake reviews detection: a survey[J]. IEEE Access20219: 65771-65802. DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3075573 .
[4] Refaeli D, Hajek P. Detecting fake online reviews using fine-tuned BERT[C]//Proceedings of the 2021 5th International Conference on E-Business and Internet. October 15 - 17, 2021, Singapore, Singapore. ACM, 2021: 76-80. DOI: 10.1145/3497701.3497714 .
[5] Hu B Z, Sheng Q, Cao J, et al. Bad actor, good advisor: exploring the role of large language models in fake news detection[J]. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence202438(20): 22105-22113. DOI: 10.1609/aaai.v38i20.30214 .
[6] Huang Y, Sun L, FakeGPT: fake news generation, explanation and detection of large language models[EB/OL].arXiv 2023:2310.05046.(2023-10-08)[2024-08-23]..
[7] Ke J, Xu Z, Xu T,et al.An implicit semantic enhanced fine-grained fake news detection method based on large language models[J]. Journal of Computer Research and Development202461(5): 1250-1260.DOI: 10.7544/issn1000-1239.202330967 .
[8] Devlin J, Chang M, Lee K, et al. BERT: pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding[C]//Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Vol 1(Long and Short papers): 4171-4186.
[9] Oliver M, Wang G. Crafting efficient fine-tuning strategies for large language models[EB/OL].arXiv 2023:2407.13906.(2023-07-18)[2024-08-23]..
[10] Singh A, Pandey N. A study of optimizations for fine-tuning large language models[EB/OL].arXiv 2024:2406.02290.(2024-06-06)[2024-08-23]..
[11] Duma R A, Niu Z D, Nyamawe A S, et al. Fake review detection techniques, issues, and future research directions: a literature review[J]. Knowledge and Information Systems202466(9): 5071-5112. DOI: 10.1007/s10115-024-02118-2 .
[12] Zhang D S, Zhou L N, Kehoe J L, et al. What online reviewer behaviors really matter? effects of verbal and nonverbal behaviors on detection of fake online reviews[J]. Journal of Management Information Systems201633(2): 456-481. DOI:10.1080/07421222.2016.1205907 .
[13] Casillo M, Colace F, Gupta B B, et al. Fake news detection using LDA topic modelling and K-nearest neighbor classifier[C]// Computational Data and Social Networks. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2021: 330-339. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-91434-9_29 .
[14] Kumar N, Venugopal D, Qiu L F, et al. Detecting review manipulation on online platforms with hierarchical supervised learning[J]. Journal of Management Information Systems201835(1): 350-380. DOI:10.1080/07421222.2018.1440758 .
[15] Zhang W, Zhang X, Chen J D, et al. Stacking GA2M for inherently interpretable fraudulent reviewer identification by fusing target and non-target features[J].International Journal of General Systems202454(3):298-333. DOI:10.1080/03081079.2024.2384404 .
[16] Du Q, Zong C, Zhang J. MoDS: model-oriented data selection for instruction tuning[EB/OL].arXiv 2023:2311.15653.(2023-11-27)[2024-08-22]..
[17] Li M, Zhang Y, Li Z T, et al. From quantity to quality: boosting LLM performance with self-guided data selection for instruction tuning[C]//Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies,2024,Vol 1: 7602-7635.DOI: 10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.421
[18] Mehta V, Agarwal M, Kaliyar R K. A comprehensive and analytical review of text clustering techniques[J]. International Journal of Data Science and Analytics202418(3): 239-258. DOI: 10.1007/s41060-024-00540-x .
[19] Wang H, Zhou C D, Li L X. Design and application of a text clustering algorithm based on parallelized K-means clustering[J]. Revue D’ Intelligence Artificielle201933(6): 453-460. DOI: 10.18280/ria.330608 .
[20] Petukhova A, Matos-Carvalho J P, Fachada N. Text clustering with large language model embeddings[J]. International Journal of Cognitive Computing in Engineering20256: 100-108. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijcce.2024.11.004 .
[21] Ding N, Qin Y J, Yang G, et al. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning of large-scale pre-trained language models[J]. Nature Machine Intelligence20235(3): 220-235. DOI: 10.1038/s42256-023-00626-4 .
[22] Hu E J, Shen Y, Wallis P, et al. LoRA: low-rank adaptation of large language models[C]. ICLR 2022 Conference,2022,1912. .
[23] Pennington J, Socher R, Manning C. Glove: global vectors for word representation[C]//Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). Doha, Qatar. Stroudsburg, PA, USA: ACL, 2014: 1532-1543. DOI: 10.3115/v1/d14-1162 .
[24] Hartigan J A, Wong M A. Algorithm AS 136: a K-means clustering algorithm[J]. Applied Statistics197928(1): 100. DOI: 10.2307/2346830 .
[25] Oyewole G J, Thopil G A. Data clustering: application and trends[J]. Artificial Intelligence Review202356(7): 6439-6475. DOI: 10.1007/s10462-022-10325-y .
[26] Upadhye A. A survey of text clustering techniques: algorithms, applications, and challenges[J]. International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR)202110(9): 1749-1752. DOI: 10.21275/sr24304163737 .
[27] Rayana S, Akoglu L. Collective opinion Spam detection: bridging review networks and metadata[C]//Proceedings of the 21th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. Sydney NSW Australia. ACM, 2015: 985-994. DOI: 10.1145/2783258.2783370 .
[28] Loshchilov I, Hutter F. Decoupled weight decay regularization[EB/OL]. arXiv 2017:1711.05101. (2017-11-14)[2024-08-22]. .
[29] Liu Y, Ott M, Goyal N, et al. RoBERTa: a robustly optimized BERT pretraining approach[EB/OL].arXiv 2019:1907.11692. (2019-07-26)[2024-08-23]..
[30] Chawla N V, Bowyer K W, Hall L O, et al. SMOTE: synthetic minority over-sampling technique[J]. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research200216(1): 321-357. DOI: 10.5555/1622407.1622416 .
[31] Parsaeimehr E, Fartash M, Akbari Torkestani J. Improving feature extraction using a hybrid of CNN and LSTM for entity identification[J]. Neural Processing Letters202355(5): 5979-5994. DOI: 10.1007/s11063-022-11122-y .
Outlines

/