A study on text-score disagreement in online reviews

In this paper, we focus on online reviews and employ artificial intelligence tools, taken from the cognitive computing field, to help understanding the relationships between the textual part of the review and the assigned numerical score. We move from the intuitions that 1) a set of textual reviews expressing different sentiments may feature the same score (and vice-versa); and 2) detecting and analyzing the mismatches between the review content and the actual score may benefit both service providers and consumers, by highlighting specific factors of satisfaction (and dissatisfaction) in texts. To prove the intuitions, we adopt sentiment analysis techniques and we concentrate on hotel reviews, to find polarity mismatches therein. In particular, we first train a text classifier with a set of annotated hotel reviews, taken from the Booking website. Then, we analyze a large dataset, with around 160k hotel reviews collected from Tripadvisor, with the aim of detecting a polarity mismatch, indicating if the textual content of the review is in line, or not, with the associated score. Using well established artificial intelligence techniques and analyzing in depth the reviews featuring a mismatch between the text polarity and the score, we find that -on a scale of five stars- those reviews ranked with middle scores include a mixture of positive and negative aspects. The approach proposed here, beside acting as a polarity detector, provides an effective selection of reviews -on an initial very large dataset- that may allow both consumers and providers to focus directly on the review subset featuring a text/score disagreement, which conveniently convey to the user a summary of positive and negative features of the review target.Comment: This is the accepted version of the paper. The final version will be published in the Journal of Cognitive Computation, available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12559-017-9496-

Web Data Extraction, Applications and Techniques: A Survey

Web Data Extraction is an important problem that has been studied by means of different scientific tools and in a broad range of applications. Many approaches to extracting data from the Web have been designed to solve specific problems and operate in ad-hoc domains. Other approaches, instead, heavily reuse techniques and algorithms developed in the field of Information Extraction. This survey aims at providing a structured and comprehensive overview of the literature in the field of Web Data Extraction. We provided a simple classification framework in which existing Web Data Extraction applications are grouped into two main classes, namely applications at the Enterprise level and at the Social Web level. At the Enterprise level, Web Data Extraction techniques emerge as a key tool to perform data analysis in Business and Competitive Intelligence systems as well as for business process re-engineering. At the Social Web level, Web Data Extraction techniques allow to gather a large amount of structured data continuously generated and disseminated by Web 2.0, Social Media and Online Social Network users and this offers unprecedented opportunities to analyze human behavior at a very large scale. We discuss also the potential of cross-fertilization, i.e., on the possibility of re-using Web Data Extraction techniques originally designed to work in a given domain, in other domains.Comment: Knowledge-based System