An important part of our information-gathering behavior has always been to find out what other people think. With the growing availability and popularity of opinion-rich resources such as online review sites and personal blogs, new opportunities and challenges arise as people now can, and do, actively use information technologies to seek out and understand the opinions of others. The sudden eruption of activity in the area of opinion mining and sentiment analysis, which deals with the computational treatment of opinion, sentiment, and subjectivity in text, has thus occurred at least in part as a direct response to the surge of interest in new systems that deal directly with opinions as a first-class object. This survey covers techniques and approaches that promise to directly enable opinion-oriented information-seeking systems. Our focus is on methods that seek to address the new challenges raised by sentiment-aware applications, as compared to those that are already present in more traditional fact-based analysis. We include materialon summarization of evaluative text and on broader issues regarding privacy, manipulation, and economic impact that the development of opinion-oriented information-access services gives rise to. To facilitate future work, a discussion of available resources, benchmark datasets, and evaluation campaigns is also provided.

Trust and reputation systems represent a significant trend in decision support for Internet mediated service provision. The basic idea is to let parties rate each other, for example after the completion of a transaction, and use the aggregated ratings about a given party to derive a trust or reputation score, which can assist other parties in deciding whether or not to transact with that party in the future. A natural side effect is that it also provides an incentive for good behaviour, and therefore tends to have a positive effect on market quality. Reputation systems can be called collaborative sanctioning systems to reflect their collaborative nature, and are related to collaborative filtering systems. Reputation systems are already being used in successful commercial online applications. There is also a rapidly growing literature around trust and reputation systems, but unfortunately this activity is not very coherent. The purpose of this article is to give an overview of existing and proposed systems that can be used to derive measures of trust and reputation for Internet transactions, to analyse the current trends and developments in this area, and to propose a research agenda for trust and reputation systems.

Web spam pages use various techniques to achieve higher-than-deserved rankings in a search engine’s results. While human experts can identify spam, it is too expensive to manually evaluate a large number of pages. Instead, we propose techniques to semi-automatically separate reputable, good pages from spam. We first select a small set of seed pages to be evaluated by an expert. Once we manually identify the reputable seed pages, we use the link structure of the web to discover other pages that are likely to be good. In this paper we discuss possible ways to implement the seed selection and the discovery of good pages. We present results of experiments run on the World Wide Web indexed by AltaVista and evaluate the performance of our techniques. Our results show that we can effectively filter out spam from a significant fraction of the web, based on a good seed set of less than 200 sites. 1

A network of people connected by directed ratings or trust scores, and a model for propagating those trust scores, is a fundamental building block in many of today's most successful e-commerce and recommendation systems. In eBay, such a model of trust has significant influence on the price an item may command. In Epinions (epinions.com), conclusions drawn from the web of trust are linked to many behaviors of the system, including decisions on items to which each user is exposed. We develop a framework of trust propagation schemes, each of which may be appropriate in certain circumstances, and evaluate the schemes on a large trust network consisting of 800K trust scores expressed among 130K people. We show that a small number of expressed trusts/distrust per individual allows us to predict reliably trust between any two people in the system with high accuracy: a quadratic increase in actionable information. Our work appears to be the first to incorporate distrust in a computational trust propagation setting.

Distributed computer architectures labeled “peer-to-peer ” are designed for the sharing of computer resources (content, storage, CPU cycles) by direct exchange, rather than requiring the intermediation or support of a centralized server or authority. Peer-to-peer architectures are characterized by their ability to adapt to failures and accommodate transient populations of nodes while maintaining acceptable connectivity and performance. Content distribution is an important peer-to-peer application on the Internet that has received considerable research attention. Content distribution applications typically allow personal computers to function in a coordinated manner as a distributed storage medium by contributing, searching, and obtaining digital content. In this survey, we propose a framework for analyzing peer-to-peer content distribution technologies. Our approach focuses on nonfunctional characteristics such as security, scalability, performance, fairness, and resource management potential, and examines the way in which these characteristics are reflected in—and affected by—the architectural design decisions adopted by current peer-to-peer systems. We study current peer-to-peer systems and infrastructure technologies in terms of their distributed object location and routing mechanisms, their approach to content replication, caching and migration, their support for encryption, access control, authentication and identity, anonymity, deniability, accountability and reputation, and their use of resource trading and management schemes.

Abstract. Though research on the Semantic Web has progressed at a steady pace, its promise has yet to be realized. One major difficulty is that, by its very nature, the Semantic Web is a large, uncensored system to which anyone may contribute. This raises the question of how much credence to give each source. We cannot expect each user to know the trustworthiness of each source, nor would we want to assign top-down or global credibility values due to the subjective nature of trust. We tackle this problem by employing a web of trust, in which each user provides personal trust values for a small number of other users. We compose these trusts to compute the trust a user should place in any other user in the network. A user is not assigned a single trust rank. Instead, different users may have different trust values for the same user. We define properties for combination functions which merge such trusts, and define a class of functions for which merging may be done locally while maintaining these properties. We give examples of specific functions and apply them to data from Epinions and our BibServ bibliography server. Experiments confirm that the methods are robust to noise, and do not put unreasonable expectations on users. We hope that these methods will help move the Semantic Web closer to fulfilling its promise. 1.

Lack of cooperation (free riding) is one of the key problems that confronts today's P2P systems. What makes this problem particularly difficult is the unique set of challenges that P2P systems pose: large populations, high turnover, asymmetry of interest, collusion, zero-cost identities, and traitors. To tackle these challenges we model the P2P system using the Generalized Prisoner's Dilemma (GPD), and propose the Reciprocative decision function as the basis of a family of incentives techniques. These techniques are fully distributed and include: discriminating server selection, maxflowbased subjective reputation, and adaptive stranger policies. Through simulation, we show that these techniques can drive a system of strategic users to nearly optimal levels of cooperation.

Reputation systems can be tricked by the spread of false reputation ratings, be it false accusations or false praise. Simple solutions such as exclusively relying on one's own direct observations have drawbacks, as they do not make use of all the information available. We propose a fully distributed reputation system that can cope with false disseminated information. In our approach, everyone maintains a reputation rating and a trust rating about everyone else that they care about. From time to time first-hand reputation information is exchanged with others; using a modified Bayesian approach we designed and present in this paper, only second-hand reputation information that is not incompatible with the current reputation rating is accepted. Thus, reputation ratings are slightly modified by accepted information. Trust ratings are updated based on the compatibility of second-hand reputation information with prior reputation ratings. Data is entirely distributed: someone's reputation and trust is the collection of ratings maintained by others. We enable redemption and prevent the sudden exploitation of good reputation built over time by introducing re-evaluation and reputation fading.

We devise a simple model to study the phenomenon of free-riding and the effect of free identities on user behavior in peer-to-peer systems. At the heart of our model is a strategic user of a certain type, an intrinsic and private parameter that reflects the user's generosity. The user decides whether to contribute or free-ride based on how the current burden of contributing in the system compares to her type. We derive the emerging cooperation level in equilibrium and quantify the effect of providing free-riders with degraded service on the emerging cooperation. We find that this penalty mechanism is beneficial mostly when the "generosity level" of the society (i.e., the average type) is low. To quantify the social cost of free identities, we extend the model to account for dynamic scenarios with turnover (users joining and leaving) and with whitewashers: users who strategically leave the system and re-join with a new identity. We find that the imposition of penalty on all legitimate newcomers incurs a significant social loss only under high turnover rates in conjunction with intermediate societal generosity levels.

Due to the open, anonymous nature of many P2P networks, new identities- or sybils- may be created cheaply and in large numbers. Given a reputation system, a peer may attempt to falsely raise its reputation by creating fake links between its sybils. Many existing reputation mechanisms are not resistant to these types of strategies. Using a static graph formulation of reputation, we attempt to formalize the notion of sybilproofness. We show that there is no symmetric sybilproof reputation function. For nonsymmetric reputations, following the notion of reputation propagation along paths, we give a general asymmetric reputation function based on flow and give conditions for sybilproofness.