Temporal Model of the Online Customer Review Helpfulness Prediction

Customer reviews provide opinions and relevant information that will affect the purchase behavior of other customers. Many studies focused on the prediction of the helpfulness of customer reviews to find the helpful reviews, which are traditionally determined by the helpful voting results. In our study, we find that the voting result of an online review is not a constant over time. Therefore, predicting the voting result based on the analysis of text is not enough; the temporal issue must be considered. We propose a system that can rank the reviews based on a set of linguistic features with a linear regression model. To evaluate our system, we collect Chinese custom reviews in eight product categories (books, digital cameras, tablet PC, backpacks, movies, men shoes, toys and cell phones) from Amazon.cn with the voting result on the helpfulness of the reviews. Since the voting result may be affected by voting time and total voting number, we define a new evaluation index and compare the regression results. The results show that the system has less prediction error when it takes the time information into the prediction model.