Coping with subjectivity and dishonesty in opinion evaluation by exploiting social factors

Abstract

In large and open environments, users may often encounter entities (e.g. people, products and information) which they have no previous experience with or prior knowledge of. In this case, they usually rely on the experience or knowledge of other users (referred as advisors) in the form of opinions (e.g. reviews and ratings), to choose which entities to interact with. However, in these environments, users can freely express their opinions, and the quality of opinions may then vary. Of all the possible reasons that result in diversity of opinion quality, the following two are the most dominant: (1) users are subjectively different, which thus leads to discrepancy of users' opinions towards same entities; and (2) some users might be dishonest and lie about their experience with entities. However, some existing approaches may only consider either dishonesty or subjectivity difference, while others cannot accurately distinguish these two different aspects.