Multi-Task Neural Learning Architecture for End-to-End Identification of Helpful Reviews

Abstract

Helpful reviews play a pivotal role in recommending desirable goods and accelerating purchase decisions of customers in e-commercial services. Given a large proportion of product reviews with unknown helpfulness/unhelpfulness, the research on automatic identification of helpful reviews has drawn much attention in recent years. However, state-of-the-art approaches still rely heavily on extracting heuristic text features from reviews with domain-specific knowledge. In this paper, we first introduce a multi-task neural learning (MTNL) architecture for identifying helpful reviews. The end-to-end neural architecture can learn to reconstruct effective features upon the raw input of words and even characters, and the multi-task learning paradigm helps to make more accurate predictions of helpful reviews based on a secondary task which fits the star ratings of reviews. We also build two datasets containing helpful/unhelpful reviews from different product categories in Amazon, and compare the performance of MTNL with several mainstream methods on both datasets. Experimental results confirm that MTNL outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches by a significant margin.