Journal of Information Systems and Informatics
Vol 8 No 2 (2026): April

Detecting Deceptive Online Reviews Using a Semantic Reliability Index and Hybrid Text Representation

Hartatik (Universitas Amikom Yogyakarta)
Andri Syafrianto (STMIK El Rahma)



Article Info

Publish Date
12 Apr 2026

Abstract

Online review platforms such as Yelp play an important role in consumer decision-making, but the growing prevalence of fake reviews undermines their reliability. This study proposes a hybrid approach for fake review detection by integrating stylometric features, language model signals, and semantic embeddings within a unified classification framework. The proposed method combines linguistic indicators, including GPT-2 perplexity, lexical diversity, sentence burstiness, punctuation ratio, and sentiment intensity, with TF-IDF representations and Sentence-BERT embeddings. A composite feature, namely the Semantic Reliability Index (SRI), is introduced to capture interactions between semantic similarity and linguistic characteristics, serving as an auxiliary feature within the hybrid model rather than a standalone classifier. Experiments on a Yelp hotel review dataset demonstrate that the hybrid model outperforms baseline methods in terms of F1-score and AUC, indicating improved discriminative capability. It should be noted that the classification setting is based on a binary transformation of ordinal labels, which may simplify the underlying label structure and influence performance interpretation. Overall, this work's contribution lies in a systematic feature-integration strategy that enhances fake review detection in the evaluated dataset.

Copyrights © 2026






Journal Info

Abbrev

isi

Publisher

Subject

Computer Science & IT

Description

Journal-ISI is a scientific article journal that is the result of ideas, great and original thoughts about the latest research and technological developments covering the fields of information systems, information technology, informatics engineering, and computer science, and industrial engineering ...