Selecting a Compact and High-Quality Representative Review Set with Information Preservation

Abstract

Consumers increasingly make informed buying decisions based on reading online reviews for products and services. Due to the large volume of available online reviews, consumers hardly have the time and patience to read them all. The goal of this paper is to select a compact set of high-quality reviews that can cover a specific set of product features and related consumer sentiments. The set of features covered by the selected reviews can be all product features discussed in available reviews or a subset of features tailored to the specific interests of individual consumers if such information is available. Given the features, the selected reviews will cover all the information related to them in terms of sentiment polarity to preserve information completeness. Selecting such a subset of reviews can significantly save the time spent on reading reviews while preserving the information needed. A unique review selection problem is defined and modeled as a bi-objective combinatorial optimization problem, which is then transformed into a minimum-cost set cover problem that is NP-complete. Several approximation algorithms are then designed, which can sustain performance guarantees in polynomial time. Our effective selection algorithms can also be upgraded to handle dynamic situations. Comprehensive experiments conducted on six real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithms significantly outperform benchmark methods by generating a more compact review set with much lower computational cost. The number of reviews selected is much smaller compared with the quantity of all available reviews, and the selection efficiency is deeply increased by accelerating strategies, making it very practical to adopt the methods in real-world online applications.