Summarization of Multiple, Metadata Rich, Product Reviews

F. Kokkoras, E. Lampridou, K. Ntonas, I. Vlahavas, “Summarization of Multiple, Metadata Rich, Product Reviews”, Workshop on Mining Social Data (MSoDa), 18th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI '08), Patras, Greece, 2008.

Workshop on Mining Social Data (MSoDa), 18th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI '08), Patras, Greece, 2008.

Modern successful on-line shops and product comparison sites allow consumers to express their opinion on products and services they purchased. Although such information can be useful to other potential customers, reading and mentally processing quite a few dozens or even hundreds of reviews for a single product is tedious and time consuming. In this paper, we propose ReSum a novel summarization ap-proach for multiple, metadata augmented, product reviews. We argue that the contribution of additional information (metadata) such as the user’s expertise, the usefulness of the review to other users, etc., is significant and can result in improved summaries. The summarization algorithm we propose outperforms two commercial, general purpose summarizers that ignore such metadata.