Here’s an interesting application for Natural Language Processing. How do you know if a review for a hotel or a business is real, or just a spammy one written by someone who’s never even seen the place?

Computers can do it. Just get people to write a ton of spammy reviews, then get some reviews that (you suspect) are real, and compare the patterns.

Can’t read the text? Fake reviews were more likely to use “I” and “me”, adverbs like “really”, and explanation points.

Here’s a PDF of the authors’ ACL presentation.