Indicators of fake Amazon reviews, with linguistic researcher Olu Popoola

The twelfth “People Who Read People” episode is an interview with Olu Popoola, a forensic linguistic researcher focused on studying indicators of deception. He’s a doctoral researcher at University of Birmingham U.K. and he also consults as a fraud investigator and corporate trainer on deception detection. Here’s his Twitter account: @oepopoola. Here’s his bio and here’s his blog at Outliar.blog.

Links to the episode:

• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify

Topics discussed include:

• What does linguistic analysis for deception entail?
• The definition of “coherence relations” (a basic principle of linguistic analysis)
• Indicators of fake Amazon book reviews and true/honest ones
• Popoola’s work examining Amazon reviews of Hillary Clinton’s 2017 book What Happened?
• Why is detection deception important in our modern age?

Here are some resources of Popoola’s or on subjects that came up in our talk:

• Multiple papers/works linked to from Popoola’s university page.
• Definition of “coherence” on linguistics science site
• Wikipedia entry on Rhetorical Structure Theory, which is one system for analyzing the structure of a text
• 2012 NY Times article by David Streitfeld about his analysis of fake Amazon reviews