An interesting post by Brian Bien on Amazon fake reviews, with an example of three very different reviews of the same product, all of which had this exact sentence:

The light can be pretty bright, you can adjust it where it’ll be dim and slowly brighten 30 minutes before the alarm time.

Brian makes the point:

Amazon – who has some of the world’s most advanced ML – really needs to step up its review fraud detection game. Imagine how great the Amazon shopping experience would be if we could trust its reviews.

This is one of the great potential values of machine learning. Apple’s early machine learning frameworks focused on two specific areas: Image Recognition and Natural Language Processing. Image recognition helps pick out images of cats, or roses, or your best friend Francis from your photo library. Natural Language Processing (NLP) focuses on parsing streams of text to pull out relevant details.

The fake reviews problem is a perfect problem for NLP and machine learning. There’s really no reason Amazon can’t do better. Maybe Apple could give them a hand.