  Online reviews have increasingly become a very important resource for
consumers when making purchases. Though it is becoming more and more difficult
for people to make well-informed buying decisions without being deceived by
fake reviews. Prior works on the opinion spam problem mostly considered
classifying fake reviews using behavioral user patterns. They focused on
prolific users who write more than a couple of reviews, discarding one-time
reviewers. The number of singleton reviewers however is expected to be high for
many review websites. While behavioral patterns are effective when dealing with
elite users, for one-time reviewers, the review text needs to be exploited. In
this paper we tackle the problem of detecting fake reviews written by the same
person using multiple names, posting each review under a different name. We
propose two methods to detect similar reviews and show the results generally
outperform the vectorial similarity measures used in prior works. The first
method extends the semantic similarity between words to the reviews level. The
second method is based on topic modeling and exploits the similarity of the
reviews topic distributions using two models: bag-of-words and
bag-of-opinion-phrases. The experiments were conducted on reviews from three
different datasets: Yelp (57K reviews), Trustpilot (9K reviews) and Ott dataset
(800 reviews).
