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Foundations and Applications of Intelligent Systems pp 411–420Cite as

Estimating Online Review Helpfulness with Probabilistic Distribution and Confidence

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Part of the book series: Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing ((AISC,volume 213))

Abstract

Product review helpfulness information is useful knowledge for consumers in their online shopping decision processes. Unlike the traditional method using the simple voting percentages, this paper proposes a new method for estimating the degrees of helpfulness with two features. One is to take into account the helpfulness distribution information on all reviews of concern in determination of helpfulness degrees; the other is to construct confidence intervals (CIs) of helpfulness to distinguish different reviews with the same voting percentage. Both synthetic and real data experiments, along with an illustrative example, reveal that the proposed method is superior to the traditional one in light of estimation accuracy.

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Acknowledgments

The work was partly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (70890083/71072015/71110107027), Tsinghua University’s Initiative Scientific Research Program (20101081741), and Research Center for Contemporary Management.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Zunqiang Zhang, Qiang Wei & Guoqing Chen

Authors
  1. Zunqiang Zhang
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  2. Qiang Wei
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  3. Guoqing Chen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Qiang Wei .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, People's Republic of China

    Fuchun Sun

  2. School of Information Science and Technology, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, People's Republic of China

    Tianrui Li

  3. Department of Computer Science and Techn, Tsinghua University, Beijing, People's Republic of China

    Hongbo Li

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© 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Zhang, Z., Wei, Q., Chen, G. (2014). Estimating Online Review Helpfulness with Probabilistic Distribution and Confidence. In: Sun, F., Li, T., Li, H. (eds) Foundations and Applications of Intelligent Systems. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 213. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37829-4_35

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37829-4_35

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-37828-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-37829-4

  • eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)

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