Semantic Analysis and Helpfulness Prediction of Text for Online Product Reviews

Predicting the helpfulness of product reviews is a key component of many ecommerce tasks such as review ranking and recommendation. However, previous work mixed review helpfulness prediction with those outer layer tasks. Using nontext features, it leads to less transferable models. This paper solves the problem from a new angle by hypothesizing that helpfulness is an internal property of text. Purely using review text, we isolate review helpfulness prediction from its outer layer tasks, employ two interpretable semantic features, and use human scoring of helpfulness as ground truth. Experimental results show that the two semantic features can accurately predict helpfulness scores and greatly improve the performance compared with using features previously used. Cross-category test further shows the models trained with semantic features are easier to be generalized to reviews of different product categories. The models we built are also highly interpretable and align well with human annotations.