Learning to Author Text with textual CBR

Textual reuse is an integral part of textual case-based reasoning (TCBR) which deals with solving new problems by reusing previous similar problem-solving experiences documented as text. We investigate the role of text reuse for text authoring applications that involve feedback or review generation. Generally providing feedback in the form of assigning a rating from a likert scale is far easier compared to articulating explanatory feedback as text. When previous feedback generated about the same or similar objects are maintained as cases, there is opportunity for knowledge reuse. In this paper, we show how compositional and transformational adaptation techniques can be applied once sentences in a given case are aligned to relevant structured attribute values. Three text reuse algorithms are introduced and evaluated on a dataset gathered from online Hotel reviews from TripAdvisor. Here cases consists of both structured sub-rating attributes together with textual feedback. Generally, aligned sentences linked to similar sub-rating values are clustered together and prototypical sentences are then extracted to enable reuse across similar authors. Experiments show a close similarity between our proposed texts and actual human edited review text. We also found that problems with variability in vocabulary are best addressed when prototypes are formulated from larger sets of similar sentences in contrast to smaller sets from local neighbourhoods.