Using an information quality framework to evaluate the quality of product reviews

Abstract

The prevalence of Web2.0 makes the Web an invaluable source of information. For instance, product reviews composed collaboratively by many independent Internet reviewers can help consumers make purchase decisions and enable manufactures to improve their business strategies. As the number of reviews is increasing exponentially, opinion mining is needed to identify important reviews and opinions for users. Most opinion mining approaches try to extract sentimental or bipolar expressions from a large volume of reviews. However, the mining process often ignores the quality of each review and may retrieve useless or even noisy reviews. In this paper, we propose a method for evaluating the quality of information in product reviews. We treat review quality evaluation as a classification problem and employ an effective information quality framework to extract representative review features. Experiments based on an expert-composed data corpus demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches significantly. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.