Ensemble learning approach for distinguishing human and computer-generated Arabic reviews

While customer reviews are crucial for businesses to maintain their standing in the marketplace, some may employ humans to create favorable reviews for their benefit. However, advances in artificial intelligence have made it less complex to create these reviews, which now rival real ones written by humans. This poses a significant challenge in distinguishing between genuine and artificially generated reviews, thereby impacting consumer trust and decision-making processes. Research has been conducted to classify whether English reviews were authored by humans or computers. However, there is a notable scarcity of similar studies conducted in Arabic. Moreover, the potential of ensemble learning (EL) techniques, such as soft voting, to enhance model performance remains underexplored. This study conducts a comprehensive empirical analysis using various models, including traditional machine learning, deep learning, and transformers, with an investigation into ensemble techniques, like soft voting, to classify human and computer-generated Arabic reviews. Integrating top logistic regression (LR) and convolutional neural network (CNN) models, it achieves an accuracy of 89.70%, akin to AraBERT's 90.0%. Additionally, a thorough textual analysis, covering parts of speech (POS), emotions, and linguistics reveals significant linguistic disparities between human and computer-generated reviews. Notably, computer-generated reviews exhibit a substantially higher proportion of adjectives (6.3%) compared to human reviews (0.46%), providing crucial insights for discerning between the two review types. The results not only advance natural language processing (NLP) in Arabic but also have significant implications for businesses combating the influence of fake reviews on consumer trust and decision-making.