Quality evaluation of product reviews using an information quality framework

The ubiquity of Web2.0 makes the Web an invaluable source of business information. For instance, product reviews composed collaboratively by many independent Internet reviewers can help consumers make purchase decisions and enable enterprises to improve their business strategies. As the number of reviews is increasing exponentially, opinion mining and retrieval techniques are needed to identify important reviews and opinions to answer users' queries. Most opinion mining and retrieval approaches try to extract sentimental or bipolar expressions from a large volume of reviews. However, the process often ignores the quality of each review and may retrieve useless or even noisy documents. In this paper, we propose a method for evaluating the quality of information in product reviews. We treat the evaluation of review quality as a classification problem and employ an effective information quality framework to extract representative review features. Experiments based on an expert-composed data corpus demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches significantly. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.