• Journal of KIISE
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• v.43 no.9
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• pp.983-997
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• 2016

Many available online product reviews for any given product makes it difficult for a consumer to locate the helpful reviews. The purpose of this study was to investigate automatic helpfulness evaluation of online product reviews according to review information types based on the target of information. The underlying assumption was that consumers find reviews containing specific information related to the product itself or the reliability of reviewers more helpful than peripheral information, such as shipping or customer service. Therefore, each sentence was categorized by given information types, which reduced the semantic space of review sentences. Subsequently, we extracted specific information from sentences by using a topic-based representation of the sentences and a clustering algorithm. Review ranking experiments indicated more effective results than other comparable approaches.