Aspect Mining with Rating Bias

Due to the personalized needs for specific aspect evaluation on product quality, these years have witnessed a boom of researches on aspect rating prediction, whose goal is to extract ad hoc aspects from online reviews and predict rating or opinion on each aspect. Most of the existing works on aspect rating prediction have a basic assumption that the overall rating is the average score of aspect ratings or the overall rating is very close to aspect ratings. However, after analyzing real datasets, we have an insightful observation: there is an obvious rating bias between overall rating and aspect ratings. Motivated by this observation, we study the problem of aspect mining with rating bias, and design a novel RAting-center model with BIas (RABI). Different from the widely used review-center models, RABI adopts the overall rating as the center of the probabilistic model, which generates reviews and topics. In addition, a novel aspect rating variable in RABI is designed to effectively integrate the rating bias priori information. Experiments on two real datasets (Dianping and TripAdvisor) validate that RABI significantly improves the prediction accuracy over existing state-of-the-art methods.