Efficiency of automatic text generators for online review content generation

A. Perez-Castro, M.R. Martínez-Torres and S.L. Toral

Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 2023, vol. 189, issue C

Abstract: The evolution of Artificial Intelligence has led to the appearance of automatic text generators able to closely resemble human writing, endangering the development of e-commerce and the consumer confidence. Thus, it is critical to deeply understand how these text generators work to present the presence of deceptive reviews. This paper analyzes one of the most popular text generators, GPT2 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 2), and studies its effectivity compared to human-generated reviews using previously published classifiers trained to distinguish between real and deceptive reviews. One parameter of the model is the so-called temperature, which determines how deterministic the model is. The temperature adjusts the probability distribution of the words in the model, so that a higher temperature translates into a higher degree of inventiveness in the generation of the texts. Findings reveal (i) that automatically-generated deceptive reviews worsen the accuracy of existing classifiers, this effect being accentuated by the degree of inventiveness; (ii) that their performance depends on the data used to train the generator; and (iii) that the sentiment polarity has no effect on the performance of detection classifiers.

Keywords: Deceptive reviews generation; Word-based encoding; Context-based encoding; Pretrained models; Transfer learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040162523000653
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:tefoso:v:189:y:2023:i:c:s0040162523000653

DOI: 10.1016/j.techfore.2023.122380

Access Statistics for this article

Technological Forecasting and Social Change is currently edited by Fred Phillips

More articles in Technological Forecasting and Social Change from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().