Petrocchi, Marinella
From Online Behaviours to Images: A Novel Approach to Social Bot Detection
Di Paolo, Edoardo, Petrocchi, Marinella, Spognardi, Angelo
Online Social Networks have revolutionized how we consume and share information, but they have also led to a proliferation of content not always reliable and accurate. One particular type of social accounts is known to promote unreputable content, hyperpartisan, and propagandistic information. They are automated accounts, commonly called bots. Focusing on Twitter accounts, we propose a novel approach to bot detection: we first propose a new algorithm that transforms the sequence of actions that an account performs into an image; then, we leverage the strength of Convolutional Neural Networks to proceed with image classification. We compare our performances with state-of-the-art results for bot detection on genuine accounts / bot accounts datasets well known in the literature. The results confirm the effectiveness of the proposal, because the detection capability is on par with the state of the art, if not better in some cases.
Priorities-Based Review Computation
Costantino, Gianpiero (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche) | Martinelli, Fabio (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche) | Petrocchi, Marinella (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche)
Recently, online vendors and providers manage review systems as a mechanism to advertise their services and goods over the Web. In making their choice, clients can rely on feedback expressing the degree of satisfaction of past users with respect to such services and goods. This set of feedback, or reviews, may be filtered by categories of users, they may be affected by multiple factors, and they are elaborated in order to obtain an overall score, representing a global indicator aimed at summarising the level of quality of that service. In this paper, we concentrate on multi-factor review,~\ie a review whose value is computed assembling the scores given to a set of parameters that may affect the quality level of a service. Our interest is evaluating the relevance, or dominance, of some parameter with respect to the others. We advocate the use of the Analytic Hierarchy Process, a well-known technique born in the area of multi-criteria decision making, to derive the priorities to assign to the scores of the single parameters. We illustrate the proposal on the example of hotel reviews.