Comparing summarisation techniques for informal online reviews

Abstract

In this paper we evaluate three methods for summarising game reviews written in a casual style. This was done in order to create a review summarisation system to be used by clients of deltaDNA. We look at one well-known method based on natural language processing, and describe two statistical methods that could be used for summarisation: one based on TF-IDF scores another using supervised latent Dirichlet allocation. We find, due to the informality of these online reviews, that natural language based techniques work less well than they do on other types of reviews, and we recommend using techniques based on the statistical properties of the words' frequencies. In particular, we decided to use a TF-IDF score based system in the final system.