A Graph-Based Method for Predicting the Helpfulness of Product Opinions

Abstract

This paper presents a new approach to predict the helpfulness of opinions. Usually, researchers in this area use tables of attribute-value to aggregate the features that represent the evaluated texts. Although that representation is common, it considers that the objects are independent. We argue that among the discriminant factors of the helpfulness of opinions, there are dependent factors of the relationship among the opinion-forming elements. Thus, we modeled this task as a network, considering the information of relations among objects in the network (comments, stars, and words). A regularization technique of graphs is used to extract the relevant features of graph structure and, after that, the comments are classified as helpful or unhelpful. We compared our network model with two baselines methods, one based on fuzzy logic and another based on Neural Networks. Our model outperformed the fuzzy logic and Neutal Network methods in 0.17 and 0.19 of F-measure, respectively. The main advantages of our approach are that few data are necessary to helpfulness classification and the relationships may help in the understanding the classification, explaining the reasons for a determinate classification.