Abstract
Currently, there are many online review web sites where consumers can freely write comments about different kinds of products and services. These comments are quite useful for other potential consumers. However, the number of online comments is often large and the number continues to grow as more and more consumers contribute. In addition, one comment may mention more than one product and contain opinions about different products, mentioning something good and something bad. However, they share only a single overall score. Therefore, it is not easy to know the quality of an individual product from these comments.
This paper presents a novel approach to generate review summaries including scores and description snippets with respect to each individual product. From the large number of comments, we first extract the context (snippet) that includes a description of the products and choose those snippets that express consumer opinions on them. We then propose several methods to predict the rating (from 1 to 5 stars) of the snippets. Finally, we derive a generic framework for generating summaries from the snippets. We design a new snippet selection algorithm to ensure that the returned results preserve the opinion-aspect statistical properties and attribute-aspect coverage based on a standard seat allocation algorithm. Through experimentswe demonstrate empirically that our methods are effective. We also quantitatively evaluate each step of our approach.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Liu J, Cao Y, Lin C Y, Huang Y, Zhou M. Low-quality product review detection in opinion summarization. In: Proceedings of the Joint Meeting of the Conference on Empirical Methods on Natural Language Processing and the Conference on Natural Language Learing. 2007, 334–342
Lappas T, Crovella M, Terzi E. Selecting a characteristic set of reviews. In: Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. 2012, 832–840
Dang V, Croft W B. Diversity by proportionality: an election-based approach to search result diversification. In: Proceedings of the 35th ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. 2012, 65–74
Tsaparas P, Ntoulas A, Terzi E. Selecting a comprehensive set of reviews. In: Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. 2011, 168–176
Yu W, Zhang R, He X. Selecting a diversified set of reviews. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2013, 7808, 721–733
Sinha P, Mehrotra S, Jain R. Summarization of personal photologs using multidimensional content and context. In: Proceedings of the 1st ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval. 2011, 4
Lu Y, Tsaparas P, Ntoulas A, Polanyi L. Exploiting social context for review quality prediction. In: Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World Wide Web. 2010, 691–700
O’Mahony M P, Smyth B. Learning to recommend helpful hotel reviews. In: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM Conference on Recommender Systems. 2009, 305–308
Kim S M, Pantel P, Chklovski T, Pennacchiotti M. Automatically assessing review helpfulness. In: Proceedings of the 2006 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2006, 423–430
Liu Y, Huang X, An A, Yu X. Modeling and predicting the helpfulness of online reviews. In: Proceedings of the 8th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining. 2008, 443–452
Zhang R, Sha C F, Zhou M Q, Zhou A Y. Exploiting shopping and reviewing behavior to re-score online evaluations. In: Proceedings of the 21st International Conference Companion on World Wide Web. 2012, 649–650
Lappas T, Gunopulos D. Efficient confident search in large review corpora. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2010, 6322: 195–210
Ganesan K, Zhai C, Viegas E. Micropinion generation: an unsupervised approach to generating ultra-concise summaries of opinions. In: Proceedings of the 21st International Conference Companion onWorld Wide Web. 2012, 869–878
Hu M, Liu B. Mining and summarizing customer reviews. In: Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. 2004, 168–177
Zhuang L, Jing F, Zhu X Y. Movie review mining and summarization. In: Proceedings of the 15th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management. 2006, 43–50
Meng X, Wang H. Mining user reviews: from specification to summarization. In: Proceedings of the ACL-IJCNLP 2009 Conference Short Papers. 2009, 177–180
Moghaddam S, Ester M. Opinion digger: an unsupervised opinion miner from unstructured product reviews. In: Proceedings of the 19th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management. 2010, 1825–1828
Shimada K, Tadano R, Endo T. Multi-aspects review summarization with objective information. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2011, 27: 140–149
Zhan J, Loh H T, Liu Y. Gather customer concerns from online product reviews — a text summarization approach. Expert Systems with Applications, 2009, 36(2): 2107–2115
Pang B, Lee L, Vaithyanathan S. Thumbs up? Sentiment classification using machine learning techniques. In: Proceedings of the ACL-02 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2002, 79–86
Turney P D. Thumbs up or thumbs down? Semantic orientation applied to unsupervised classification of reviews. In: Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics. 2002, 417–424
Pang B, Lee L. Opinion mining and sentiment analysis. Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval, 2008, 2(1–2): 1–135
Kruengkrai C, Uchimoto K, Kazama J, Wang Y, Torisawa K, Isahara H. An error-driven word-character hybrid model for joint Chinese word segmentation and POS tagging. In: Proceedings of the Joint Conference of the 47th Annual Meeting of the ACL and the 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the AFNLP. 2009, 513–521
McCallum A, Nigam K. A comparison of event models for naive bayes text classification. AAAI-98 Workshop on Learning for Text Categorization, 1998, 752: 41–48
Berger A L, Pietra S A D, Pietra V J D. A maximum entropy approach to natural language processing. Journal of Computational Linguistics, 1996, 22(1): 39–71
Vapnik V. The Nature of Statistical Learning Theory. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1995
Qiu G, Liu B, Bu J, Chen C. Opinion word expansion and target extraction through double propagation. Computational Linguistics, 2011, 37(1): 9–27
Zhai Z, Liu B, Zhang L, Xu H, Jia P. Identifying evaluative sentences in online discussions. In: Proceedings of the 25th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. 2011, 933–938
Petrov S, McDonald R. Overview of the 2012 shared task on parsing the web. Notes of the First Workshop on Syntactic Analysis of Non-Canonical Language, 2012, 59
Koo T, Carreras X, Collins M. Simple semi-supervised dependency parsing. In: Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 2008, 595–603
Zhao Y, Karypis G. Criterion Functions for Document Clustering: Experiments and Analysis. Technical Report. 2001
Lapata M. Automatic evaluation of information ordering: Kendall’stau. Computational Linguistics, 2006, 32(4): 471–484
Gunawardana A, Shani G. A survey of accuracy evaluation metrics of recommendation tasks. The Journal of Machine Learning Research, 2009, 10: 2935–2962
Herlocker J L, Konstan J A, Terveen L G, Riedl J T. Evaluating collaborative filtering recommender systems. ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 2004, 22(1): 5–53
Chapelle O, Metlzer D, Zhang Y, Grinspan P. Expected reciprocal rank for graded relevance. In: Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management. 2009, 621–630
Manning C D, Raghavan P, Schütze H. Introduction to Information Retrieval. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Rong Zhang received her BS degree in computer science from Northeastern University, China in 2001 and PhD degree in computer science from Fudan University in 2007, China. She joined East China Normal University (ECNU) since 2011 and is currently an associated professor in this university. From 2007 to 2010, she worked as an expert researcher in NICT, Japan. Her current research interests include knowledge management and distributed data management.
Wenzhe Yu is currently pursuing her MS degree in Center for Cloud Computing and Big Data (CCCBD), Institute of Software Engineering, East China Normal University (ECNU), China. Before that, she received her BS degree in software engineering from ECNU in 2012. Her current research interests include Web data mining and data integration.
Chaofeng Sha is an assistant professor in Fudan University. He received the BS degree in applied mathematics in 1998 from Xidian University, China, the MS degree in 2001 and the PhD degree in 2009 from Fudan University, China, both in computer science. Since 2001, he has been in the School of Computer Science at Fudan University. His work is in the area of data mining and data management.
Xiaofeng He is a professor at Institute of Software Engineering, East China normal University (ECNU), China. He obtained his PhD degree from the Pennsylvania State University, USA. Xiaofeng’s research interests include machine learning, data mining, information retrieval. Prior to joining ECNU, Xiaofeng worked with Microsoft, Yahoo and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Aoying Zhou is a professor in computer science at East China Normal University (ECNU), China, where he is heading the Institute ofMassive Computing. Before joining ECNU in 2008, Aoying worked for Fudan University at the Computer Science Department for 15 years. He is the winner of the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the professorship appointment under Changjiang Scholars Program of Ministry of Education. He is now acting as a vicedirector of ACM SIGMOD China and Database Technology Committee of China Computer Federation. He is serving as a member of the editorial boards VLDB Journal, www Journal, etc. His research interests include data management, memory cluster computing, big data benchmarking and performance optimization.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Zhang, R., Yu, W., Sha, C. et al. Product-oriented review summarization and scoring. Front. Comput. Sci. 9, 210–223 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-014-3492-0
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-014-3492-0