Discovering clues for review quality from author's behaviors on e-commerce sites

This paper performs a high-level analysis on two kinds of data: product reviews and deal transactions and proposes a simulation model, able to generate the basic properties of the review community, especially when the above three features are taken into account.

Abstract

With the number of online reviews growing rapidly, it is increasingly difficult to digest all the information within limited time. To help users efficiently get concise information about a product, researchers have studied algorithms for automated opinion summarization. However, users might expect to further read detailed high-quality reviews in addition to a review outline. This raises another interesting problem not well studied yet: how to discover high quality product reviews? Previous research examined various properties of a product review to predict its quality. In this paper, we further explore this topic by incorporating another information resource: the behavior of review authors in an e-commerce community. First, we perform a high-level analysis on two kinds of data: product reviews and deal transactions. According to the results of this analysis, three features, including personal reputation, seller degree and expertise degree, are studied to assess the quality of a review from a credibility and expertise perspective. Our analysis shows that these features are strongly related to review quality and that they can help uncover review spamming by sellers. Furthermore, we propose a simulation model based on the above findings. The model is able to generate the basic properties of the review community, especially when the above three features are taken into account.