• Journal of Information Technology Services
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.43-55
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• 2014

More and more people are gravitating to reading products reviews prior to making purchasing decisions. As a number of reviews that vary in usefulness are posted every day, much attention is being paid to measuring their helpfulness. The goal of this paper is to investigate firstly various determinants of the helpfulness of reviews, and intends to examine the moderating effect of product type, i.e., search or experience goods on the product sales, helpfulness and helpfulness votes of online reviews. The determinants include product data, review characteristics, and textual characteristics of reviews. The results indicate that the direct effect exists for the determinants of product sales, helpfulness, and helpfulness votes. Further, the moderating effects of product type exist for these determinants on three dependent variables. The results of study will identify helpful online review and design review sites effectively.

• The Journal of Information Systems
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• v.32 no.3
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• pp.133-150
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• 2023

Purpose This study aims to develop classification models using a decision tree algorithm to identify core keywords and rules influencing online consumer review evaluations for the robot vacuum cleaner on Amazon.com. The difference from previous studies is that we analyze core keywords that affect the evaluation results by dividing the subjects that evaluate online consumer reviews into self-evaluation (star ratings) and peer evaluation (helpfulness votes). We investigate whether the core keywords influencing star ratings and helpfulness votes vary across different products and whether there is a similarity in the core keywords related to star ratings or helpfulness votes across all products. Design/methodology/approach We used random under-sampling to balance the dataset. We progressively removed independent variables based on decreasing importance through backwards elimination to evaluate the classification model's performance. As a result, we identified classification models that best predict star ratings and helpfulness votes for each product's online consumer reviews. Findings We have identified that the core keywords influencing self-evaluation and peer evaluation vary across different products, and even for the same model or features, the core keywords are not consistent. Therefore, companies' producers and marketing managers need to analyze the core keywords of each product to highlight the advantages and prepare customized strategies that compensate for the shortcomings.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.29 no.4
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• pp.309-323
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• 2023

As the role of online reviews has become increasingly crucial, numerous studies have been conducted to utilize helpful reviews. Helpful reviews, perceived by customers, have been verified in various research studies to be influenced by factors such as ratings, review length, review content, and so on. The determination of a review's helpfulness is generally based on the number of 'helpful' votes from consumers, with more 'helpful' votes considered to have a more significant impact on consumers' purchasing decisions. However, recently written reviews that have not been exposed to many customers may have relatively few 'helpful' votes and may lack 'helpful' votes altogether due to a lack of participation. Therefore, rather than relying on the number of 'helpful' votes to assess the helpfulness of reviews, we aim to classify them based on review content. In addition, the text of the review emerges as the most influential factor in review helpfulness. This study employs text mining techniques, including topic modeling and sentiment analysis, to analyze the diverse impacts of content and emotions embedded in the review text. In this study, we propose a review helpfulness prediction model based on review content, utilizing movie reviews from IMDb, a global movie information site. We construct a review helpfulness prediction model by using an explainable Graph Neural Network (GNN), while addressing the interpretability limitations of the machine learning model. The explainable graph neural network is expected to provide more reliable information about helpful or non-helpful reviews as it can identify connections between reviews.

• The Journal of Information Systems
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.203-225
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• 2018

Purpose This study investigated the impact of review language style (affective vs. cognitive) on review helpfulness and the moderating effects of the types of attractions in the relationships between the review language and its helpfulness. Design/methodology/approach This study investigates the impact of review language style (affective vs. cognitive) on review helpfulness and the moderating effects of the types of attractions in the relationships between the review language and its helpfulness. This study selected two hedonic and utilitarian attractions (Hedonic: Brandenburg Gate, Utilitarian: Peragamon Museum) located in Berlin. A total of 3,320 reviews was collected from TripAdvisor. We divided online reviews posted for these places into reviews with more affective language and with more cognitive language by using the LIWC. Then, we investigated the impact of language effect on review helpfulness across the attraction type. Findings The findings suggest that peers tend to judge more helpful toward cognitive language in attraction reviews regardless of attraction type. This study found that peers tend to perceive more helpful toward cognitive review in utilitarian attractions. Even though there was an interaction effect between review language and attraction type, in hedonic attractions, the influence of cognitive language was reduced, but still cognitive reviews would get more helpful votes.

• Journal of Information Technology Services
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.159-169
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• 2015

Customer reviews are one of the important sources for purchase decision makings in online stores. Online stores have tried to provide useful reviews in product pages to customers. To assess the usefulness of customer reviews before other users have voted enough on the reviews, diverse aspects of reviews were utilized in prevous studies. Style and semantic information were utilized in many studies. This study aims to test diverse alogrithms and datasets for identifying a proper classification method and threshold to classify useful reviews. In particular, most researches utilized ratio type helpfulness index as Amazon.com used. However, there is another type of usefulness index utilized in TripAdviser.com or Yelp.com, count type helpfulness index. There was no proper threshold to classify useful reviews yet for count type helpfulness index. This study used reivews and their usefulness votes on restaurnats from Yelp.com to devise diverse datasets and applied text mining approaches to classify useful reviews. Random Forest, SVM, and GLMNET showed the greater values of accuracy than other approaches.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.43-61
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• 2016

Customer reviews help potential customers make purchasing decisions. However, the prevalence of reviews on websites push the customer to sift through them and change the focus from a mere search to identifying which of the available reviews are valuable and useful for the purchasing decision at hand. To identify useful reviews, websites have developed different mechanisms to give customers options when evaluating existing reviews. Websites allow users to rate the usefulness of a customer review as helpful or not. Amazon.com uses a ratio-type helpfulness, while Yelp.com uses a count-type usefulness index. This usefulness index provides helpful reviews to future potential purchasers. This study investigated the effects of sentiment and readability on useful votes for customer reviews. Similar studies on the relationship between sentiment and readability have focused on the ratio-type usefulness index utilized by websites such as Amazon.com. In this study, Yelp.com's count-type usefulness index for restaurant reviews was used to investigate the relationship between sentiment/readability and usefulness votes. Yelp.com's online customer reviews for stores in the beverage and food categories were used for the analysis. In total, 170,294 reviews containing information on a store's reputation and popularity were used. The control variables were the review length, store reputation, and popularity; the independent variables were the sentiment and readability, while the dependent variable was the number of helpful votes. The review rating is the moderating variable for the review sentiment and readability. The length is the number of characters in a review. The popularity is the number of reviews for a store, and the reputation is the general average rating of all reviews for a store. The readability of a review was calculated with the Coleman-Liau index. The sentiment is a positivity score for the review as calculated by SentiWordNet. The review rating is a preference score selected from 1 to 5 (stars) by the review author. The dependent variable (i.e., usefulness votes) used in this study is a count variable. Therefore, the Poisson regression model, which is commonly used to account for the discrete and nonnegative nature of count data, was applied in the analyses. The increase in helpful votes was assumed to follow a Poisson distribution. Because the Poisson model assumes an equal mean and variance and the data were over-dispersed, a negative binomial distribution model that allows for over-dispersion of the count variable was used for the estimation. Zero-inflated negative binomial regression was used to model count variables with excessive zeros and over-dispersed count outcome variables. With this model, the excess zeros were assumed to be generated through a separate process from the count values and therefore should be modeled as independently as possible. The results showed that positive sentiment had a negative effect on gaining useful votes for positive reviews but no significant effect on negative reviews. Poor readability had a negative effect on gaining useful votes and was not moderated by the review star ratings. These findings yield considerable managerial implications. The results are helpful for online websites when analyzing their review guidelines and identifying useful reviews for their business. Based on this study, positive reviews are not necessarily helpful; therefore, restaurants should consider which type of positive review is helpful for their business. Second, this study is beneficial for businesses and website designers in creating review mechanisms to know which type of reviews to highlight on their websites and which type of reviews can be beneficial to the business. Moreover, this study highlights the review systems employed by websites to allow their customers to post rating reviews.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.129-142
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• 2016

Customer product reviews have become one of the important factors for purchase decision makings. Customers believe that reviews written by others who have already had an experience with the product offer more reliable information than that provided by sellers. However, there are too many products and reviews, the advantage of e-commerce can be overwhelmed by increasing search costs. Reading all of the reviews to find out the pros and cons of a certain product can be exhausting. To help users find the most useful information about products without much difficulty, e-commerce companies try to provide various ways for customers to write and rate product reviews. To assist potential customers, online stores have devised various ways to provide useful customer reviews. Different methods have been developed to classify and recommend useful reviews to customers, primarily using feedback provided by customers about the helpfulness of reviews. Most shopping websites provide customer reviews and offer the following information: the average preference of a product, the number of customers who have participated in preference voting, and preference distribution. Most information on the helpfulness of product reviews is collected through a voting system. Amazon.com asks customers whether a review on a certain product is helpful, and it places the most helpful favorable and the most helpful critical review at the top of the list of product reviews. Some companies also predict the usefulness of a review based on certain attributes including length, author(s), and the words used, publishing only reviews that are likely to be useful. Text mining approaches have been used for classifying useful reviews in advance. To apply a text mining approach based on all reviews for a product, we need to build a term-document matrix. We have to extract all words from reviews and build a matrix with the number of occurrences of a term in a review. Since there are many reviews, the size of term-document matrix is so large. It caused difficulties to apply text mining algorithms with the large term-document matrix. Thus, researchers need to delete some terms in terms of sparsity since sparse words have little effects on classifications or predictions. The purpose of this study is to suggest a better way of building term-document matrix by deleting useless terms for review classification. In this study, we propose neutrality index to select words to be deleted. Many words still appear in both classifications - useful and not useful - and these words have little or negative effects on classification performances. Thus, we defined these words as neutral terms and deleted neutral terms which are appeared in both classifications similarly. After deleting sparse words, we selected words to be deleted in terms of neutrality. We tested our approach with Amazon.com's review data from five different product categories: Cellphones & Accessories, Movies & TV program, Automotive, CDs & Vinyl, Clothing, Shoes & Jewelry. We used reviews which got greater than four votes by users and 60% of the ratio of useful votes among total votes is the threshold to classify useful and not-useful reviews. We randomly selected 1,500 useful reviews and 1,500 not-useful reviews for each product category. And then we applied Information Gain and Support Vector Machine algorithms to classify the reviews and compared the classification performances in terms of precision, recall, and F-measure. Though the performances vary according to product categories and data sets, deleting terms with sparsity and neutrality showed the best performances in terms of F-measure for the two classification algorithms. However, deleting terms with sparsity only showed the best performances in terms of Recall for Information Gain and using all terms showed the best performances in terms of precision for SVM. Thus, it needs to be careful for selecting term deleting methods and classification algorithms based on data sets.