To obtain a deeper understanding of the nature of deceptive opinion spam, we explore the relative utility of three potentially complementary framings of our problem.
we view the task as: (a) a standard text categorization task, in which we use n-gram-based classifiers to label opinions as either deceptive or truthful (Joachims, 1998;Sebastiani, 2002); (b) an instance of psycholinguistic deception detection, in which we expect deceptive statements to exemplify the psychological effects of lying, such as increased negative emotion and psychological distancing (Hancock et al., 2008;Newman et al., 2003); and, (c) a problem of genre identification, in which we view deceptive and truthful writing as sub-genres of imaginative and informative writing, respectively (Biber et al., 1999;Rayson et al., 2001).