Sentiment Analysis of Product Reviews to Identify Deceptive Rating Information in Social Media: A SentiDeceptive Approach

[Introduction] Nowadays, many companies are shifting their businesses online due to the growing trend among customers to buy and shop online, as people prefer online purchasing products. [Problem] Users share a vast amount of information about products, making it difficult and challenging for the end-users to make certain decisions. [Motivation] Therefore, we need a mechanism to automatically analyze end-user opinions, thoughts, or feelings in the social media platform about the products that might be useful for the customers to make or change their decisions about buying or purchasing specific products. [Proposed Solution] For this purpose, we proposed an automated SentiDecpective approach, which classifies end-user reviews into negative, positive, and neutral sentiments and identifies deceptive crowd-users rating information in the social media platform to help the user in decision-making. [Methodology] For this purpose, we first collected 11781 end-users comments from the Amazon store and Flipkart web application covering distant products, such as watches, mobile, shoes, clothes, and perfumes. Next, we develop a coding guideline used as a base for the comments annotation process. We then applied the content analysis approach and existing VADER library to annotate the end-user comments in the data set with the identified codes, which results in a labelled data set used as an input to the machine learning classifiers. Finally, we applied the sentiment analysis approach to identify the end-users opinions and overcome the deceptive rating information in the social media platforms by first preprocessing the input data to remove the irrelevant (stop words, special characters, etc.) data from the dataset, employing two standard resampling approaches to balance the data set, i-e, oversampling, and under-sampling, extract different features (TF-IDF and BOW) from the textual data in the data set and then train & test the machine learning algorithms by applying a standard cross-validation approach (KFold and Shuffle Split). [Results/Outcomes] Furthermore, to support our research study, we developed an automated tool that automatically analyzes each customer feedback and displays the collective sentiments of customers about a specific product with the help of a graph, which helps customers to make certain decisions. In a nutshell, our proposed sentiments approach produces good results when identifying the customer sentiments from the online user feedbacks, i-e, obtained an average 94.01% precision, 93.69% recall, and 93.81% F-measure value for classifying positive sentiments.