Context-Aware Helpfulness Prediction for Online Product Reviews

Modeling and prediction of review helpfulness has become more predominant due to proliferation of e-commerce websites and online shops. Since the functionality of a product cannot be tested before buying, people often rely on different kinds of user reviews to decide whether or not to buy a product. However, quality reviews might be buried deep in the heap of a large amount of reviews. Therefore, recommending reviews to customers based on the review quality is of the essence. Since there is no direct indication of review quality, most reviews use the information that “X out of Y” users found the review helpful for obtaining the review quality. However, this approach undermines helpfulness prediction because not all reviews have statistically abundant votes. In this paper, we propose a neural deep learning model that predicts the helpfulness score of a review. This model is based on convolutional neural network (CNN) and a context-aware encoding mechanism which can directly capture relationships between words irrespective of their distance in a long sequence. We validated our model on human annotated dataset and the result shows that our model significantly outperforms existing models for helpfulness prediction.