A novel deep learning model for detection of inconsistency in e-commerce websites

Abstract

On most e-commerce websites, there are two crucial factors that customers rely on to assess product quality and dependability: customer reviews provided online and related ratings. Reviews offer feedback to customers about the product’s merits, reasons for negative reviews, and feelings of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the provided service. As for ratings, they express customer opinions about the product’s quality as numerical values from one to five (one or two for the worst opinion, three for the neutral opinion, and four or five for the best opinion). Usually, the customer reviews may be inconsistent with their relevant ratings; the customer may write the worst review despite providing a four- or five-star rating or write the best review with only a one- or two-star rating. Due to this inconsistency, customers may need help to identify relevant information. Therefore, it is required to develop a model that can classify reviews as either positive or negative, depending on the polarity of thoughts, to demonstrate if there is an inconsistency between customer reviews and their actual ratings by comparing them with the ratings resulting from the model. This paper proposes an efficient deep learning (DL) model for classifying customer reviews and assessing whether there is inconsistency. The recommended model’s performance and stability are examined on a large dataset of product reviews from Amazon e-commerce. The experimental findings showed that the proposed model dominates and significantly outperforms its peers regarding prediction accuracy and other performance measures.