WatchYT: Watch Yelp Timelines

Detecting Fake Review Campaigns in Yelp



Description

Geosocial Networks such as Yelp extend review-centered sites such as Amazon or TripAdvisor with social and spatial dimensions. Users are encouraged to review visited venues.With tens of millions of reviews and tens of millions of monthly unique visitors, review based geosocial networks are playing an increasingly influential part in our lives. Their popularity and impact makes malicious behavior, in the form of fake reviews, an essential threat to their credibility and thus to the fabric of our society.
While the impact of the occasional malicious review is likely to be minimal among large number of reviews, the focus of this project is on review campaigns, concerted efforts to bias public opinion campaigns: entities that hire groups of people to write fake reviews and dishonestly improve or damage the ratings of target venues.
To address this problem, we propose WatchYT(Watch Yelp Timeline), a system that exploits Yelp's unique combination of location and social components to detect review campaigns. WatchYT is a robust autonomous monitoring system that combines several techniques to enable Yelp users to identify venues that are likely to have been targets of review campaigns as well as participants in fake review campaigns. WatchYT acts in 3 steps.
  1. In the first step,it exploits relations between a user's location and of the venues she reviews as well as her friends to define a rating for the user.
  2. The second step, which we call SpiDeR, uses several data processing and timeseries forecasting techniques to identify spikes generated by low rated reviewers.
  3. The third step, called KampaignR, flags the users that participated in multiple review campaigns.

New!

Our latest work focuses on a unique Yelp mechanism: Yelp events. Yelp Elite events are hosted by venues chosen by Yelp and attended only by Elite reviewers. We will post more details soon. Please check back!

Project Snapshots

 


WatchYT’s plugin functionality for Ike's Place
Fake Miami Venue: Bob's Tacos
Distribution of venues >4 reviews in Miami,FL

People

Publications


  1. [HotPOST@IEEE ICDCS] Yelp Events: Building Bricks Without Clay?
    Jaime Ballesteros, Bogdan Carbunar, Mahmudur Rahman, Naphtali Rishe.
    To appear in the 5th International Workshop on Hot Topics in Peer-to-peer Computing and Online Social Networks (HotPOST),
    Philadelphia, July 2013.
  2. [IEEE S&P] (Poster) Towards Detecting Yelp Review Campaigns.
    Jaime Ballesteros, Mahmudur Rahman, Bogdan Carbunar, Rahul Potharaju, Radu Sion, Nitya Narasimhan, Naphtali Rishe.
    34th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, San Francisco, May 2013.

Download

Applications

We have implemented WatchYT as two components. First, on the server side,a web server and on the client side,a browser extension running in the user’s browser. We implemented the web server using Apache Tomcat 6.0.35. We implemented the browser extension for the Chrome browser using HTML,CSS and Javascript.


  • To identify Yelp engineered venues and reviews of interest,you can download:
  • To detect Yelp Review Campaigners, you can download:
    • KampaignR: The program for detecting fake review campaigners.
  • To detect Yelp Review Campaigns, you can download:
    • SpiDeR: The program to detect review campaign target venues

Data Sets

We have developed Python web scrapers to automatically collect data from Yelp user and venue accounts. We have collected freely available proxies on the Internet and used them to request data from Yelp. To prevent having these proxies blocked by Yelp, we have changed them frequently and we have performed “polite” requests, with long inter-request intervals.


  • To get our collected dataset of yelp users and their reviews, you can download:
    • Yelp User Data : This file contains data from 10,031 Yelp users, including their id, location, number of friends and reviews. To access the header file, Click here .
    • Yelp User Review Data : This file contains data of 646,017 reviews from those 10,031 Yelp users. To access the header file, Click here .

  • To get our collected dataset of Yelp venues and their listed reviews, you can download:
  • To get our collected dataset of Yelp elite events, you can download:
    • Yelp Event Data : This file contains data of 149 Yelp Elite events including their hosting venue from 60
      major cities covering 44 states of U.S..