Zhuo Chen, Jiawei Liu, Haotan Liu (Wuhan University)

Neural network models have been widely applied in the field of information retrieval, but their vulnerability has always been a significant concern. In retrieval of public topics, the problems posed by the vulnerability are not only returning inaccurate or irrelevant content, but also returning manipulated opinions. One can distort the original ranking order based on the stance of the retrieved opinions, potentially influencing the searcher’s perception of the topic, weakening the reliability of retrieval results and damaging the fairness of opinion ranking. Based on the aforementioned challenges, we combine stance detection methods with existing text ranking manipulation methods to experimentally demonstrate the feasibility and threat of opinion manipulation. Then we design a user experiment in which each participant independently rated the credibility of the target topic based on the unmanipulated or manipulated retrieval results. The experimental result indicates that opinion manipulation can effectively influence people’s perceptions of the target topic. Furthermore, we preliminarily propose countermeasures to address the issue of opinion manipulation and build more reliable and fairer retrieval ranking systems.

View More Papers

MadRadar: A Black-Box Physical Layer Attack Framework on mmWave...

David Hunt (Duke University), Kristen Angell (Duke University), Zhenzhou Qi (Duke University), Tingjun Chen (Duke University), Miroslav Pajic (Duke University)

Read More

UniID: Spoofing Face Authentication System by Universal Identity

Zhihao Wu (Zhejiang University), Yushi Cheng (Zhejiang University), Shibo Zhang (Zhejiang University), Xiaoyu Ji (Zhejiang University), Wenyuan Xu (Zhejing University)

Read More

Reverse Engineering of Multiplexed CAN Frames (Long)

Alessio Buscemi, Thomas Engel (SnT, University of Luxembourg), Kang G. Shin (The University of Michigan)

Read More