Ranking entities using comparative relations

Abstract

This paper proposes a method for ranking entities (e.g. products, people, etc.) that uses the comparative sentences described in text such as reviews, blogs, etc. as an indicator of an individual entity's value. A comparative sentence expresses a relation between two entities. The comparative sentence "The quality of A is better than that of B" is expressed by the comparative relation {A,B,quality,better}. Given a query (set of queries), the proposed method automatically finds the competitive entities and extracts the comparative relations among them. From the vast amount of comparative relations so extracted, the proposed method then generates a graph modeling the behavior of a "potential customer" to assess the relative importance of every entity against its competitors. These ranking results help potential customers to know the position of the entity among related entities and decide which one to choose. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.