The Challenges of Modeling and Predicting Online Review Helpfulness

Predicting review helpfulness is an important task in Natural Language Processing. It is useful for dealing with the huge amount of online reviews on varied domains and languages, helping and guiding users on what to read and consider in their daily decisions. However, there are limited initiatives to investigate the nature of this task and how hard it is. This paper aims to fulfill this gap, providing a better understanding of it. Two complementary experiments are performed in order to uncover patterns of usefulness evaluation as performed by humans and relevant features for machine prediction. To assure our results, we run the experiments for two different domains: movies and apps. We show that humans agree on the process of assigning helpfulness to reviews, despite the difficulty of the task. More than this, people perform this process systematically and consistently. Finally, we empirically identify the most relevant content features for machine learning prediction of review helpfulness.