What reviews are satisfactory

Abstract

This paper focuses on exploring the features of product reviews that satisfy users, by which to improve the automatic helpfulness voting for the reviews on commercial websites. Compared to the previous work, which single-mindedly adopts the textual features to assess the review helpfulness, we propose that user preferences are more explicit clues to infer the opinions of users on the review helpfulness. By using the user-preference based features, we firstly implement a binary helpfulness based review classification system to divide helpful reviews and useless, and on the basis, we secondly build a Ranking SVM based automatic helpfulness voting system (AHV) which rank reviews based on their helpfulness. Experiments used a large scale dataset containing over 34,266 reviews on 1289 products to test the systems, which achieves promising performances with accuracy of up to 0.72 and [email protected] of 0.25, and at least 9% accuracy improvement compared to the textual-feature based helpfulness assessment.