• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.35-56
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• 2023

With the development of information and communication technology, numerous reviews are continuously posted on websites, which causes information overload problems. Therefore, users face difficulty in exploring reviews for their decision-making. To solve such a problem, many studies on review helpfulness prediction have been actively conducted to provide users with helpful and reliable reviews. Existing studies predict review helpfulness mainly based on the features included in the review. However, such studies disable providing the reason why predicted reviews are helpful. Therefore, this study aims to propose a methodology for applying eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques in review helpfulness prediction to address such a limitation. This study uses restaurant reviews collected from Yelp.com to compare the prediction performance of six models widely used in previous studies. Next, we propose an explainable review helpfulness prediction model by applying the XAI technique to the model with the best prediction performance. Therefore, the methodology proposed in this study can recommend helpful reviews in the user's purchasing decision-making process and provide the interpretation of why such predicted reviews are helpful.