Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

4-2017

Abstract

Online reviews are important decision aids to consumers. Other than helping users to evaluate individual products, reviews also support comparison shopping by comparing two (or more) products based on a specific aspect. However, making a comparison across two different reviews, written by different authors, is not always equitable due to the different standards and preferences of authors. Therefore, we focus on comparative sentences, whereby two products are compared directly by a review author within a sentence. We study the problem of comparative relation mining. Given a set of comparative sentences, each relating a pair of entities, our objective is three-fold: to interpret the comparative direction in each sentence, to identify the aspect of each sentence, and to determine the relative merits of each entity with respect to that aspect. This requires mining comparative relations at two levels of resolution: at the sentence level, and at the entity level. Our insight is that there is a significant synergy between the two levels. We propose a generative model for comparative text, which jointly models comparative directions at the sentence level, and ranking at the entity level. This model is tested comprehensively on Amazon reviews dataset with good empirical outperformance over pipelined baselines.

Keywords

comparative sentences, Generative model, comparison mining

Discipline

Databases and Information Systems | Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing

Research Areas

Data Science and Engineering

Publication

IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering

Volume

29

Issue

4

First Page

771

Last Page

783

ISSN

1041-4347

Identifier

10.1109/TKDE.2016.2640281

Publisher

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/TKDE.2016.2640281

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