A text-mining based model to detect unethical biases in online reviews: a case-study of Amazon.com

The rapid growth of social media in the last decades led e-commerce into a new era of value co-creation between the seller and the consumer. Since there is no contact with the product, people have to rely on the description of the seller, knowing that sometimes it may be biased and not entirely truth. Therefore, reviewing systems emerged in order to provide more trustworthy sources of information, since customer opinions may be less biased. The problem was, once sellers realized the importance of reviews and their direct impact on sales, the need to control this key factor arose. One of the methods developed was to offer customers a certain product in exchange for an honest review. However, in the light of the results of some studies, these "honest" reviews were proved to be biased and skew the overall rating of the product. The purpose of this work is to find patterns in these incentivized reviews and create a model that may predict whether a new review is biased or not. To study this subject, besides the sentiment analysis performed on the data, some other characteristics were taken into account, such as the overall rating, helpfulness rate, review length and the timestamp when the review was written. Results show that some of the most significant characteristics when predicting an incentivized review are the length of a review, its helpfulness rate and the overall polarity score, calculated through VADER algorithm, as the most important sentiment-related factor.O rápido crescimento das redes sociais nas últimas décadas levaram o comércio electrónico a uma nova era de co-criação de valor entre o vendedor e o consumidor. Uma vez que não há contacto com o produto, os clientes têm de se basear na descrição do vendedor, mesmo sabendo que por vezes tal descrição pode ser tendenciosa e não totalmente verdadeira. Deste modo, surgiu um sistema de reviews com o propósito de disponibilizar um meio de informação de maior confiança, uma vez que se trata de partilha de informação entre clientes e por isso mais imparcial. No entanto, quando os vendedores se aperceberam da importância das "reviews" e o seu impacto direto nas vendas, surgiu a necessidade de controlar este fator chave. Uma das formas de o fazer foi através da oferta de determinados produtos em troca de "reviews" honestas. Contudo, à luz dos resultados de alguns estudos, foi demonstrado que estas "reviews" "honestas" são tendenciosas e enviesam a classificação geral do produto. O objetivo deste estudo foi o de encontrar padrões na forma como estas "reviews" incentivadas são escritas e criar um modelo para prever se uma determinada review seria enviesada. Para esta análise, além da análise de sentimentos realizada sobre os dados, outras características foram tidas em conta, tal como a classificação geral, a taxa de "helpfulness", o tamanho da "review" e a hora a que foi escrita. Os modelos gerados mostraram que as características mais importantes na previsão de parcialidade numa "review" são o tamanho e a taxa de utilidade e como característica sentimental mais relevante a pontuação geral da "review", calculada através do algoritmo VADER

Semi-Automated & Collaborative Online Training Module For Improving Communication Skills

This paper presents a description and evaluation of the ROC Speak system, a platform that allows ubiquitous access to communication skills training. ROC Speak (available at rocspeak.com) enables anyone to go to a website, record a video, and receive feedback on smile intensity, body movement, volume modulation, filler word usage, unique word usage, word cloud of the spoken words, in addition to overall assessment and subjective comments by peers. Peer comments are automatically ranked and sorted for usefulness and sentiment (i.e., positive vs. negative). We evaluated the system with a diverse group of 56 online participants for a 10-day period. Participants submitted responses to career oriented prompts every other day. The participants were randomly split into two groups: 1) treatment - full feedback from the ROC Speak system; 2) control - written feedback from online peers. When judged by peers (p<.001) and independent raters (p<.05), participants from the treatment group demonstrated statistically significant improvement in overall speaking skills rating while the control group did not. Furthermore, in terms of speaking attributes, treatment group showed an improvement in friendliness (p<.001), vocal variety (p<.05) and articulation (p<.01)

Semi-Automated & Collaborative Online Training Module For Improving Communication Skills

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from ACM via the DOI in this recordThis paper presents a description and evaluation of the ROC Speak system, a platform that allows ubiquitous access to communication skills training. ROC Speak (available at rocspeak.com) enables anyone to go to a website, record a video, and receive feedback on smile intensity, body movement, volume modulation, filler word usage, unique word usage, word cloud of the spoken words, in addition to overall assessment and subjective comments by peers. Peer comments are automatically ranked and sorted for usefulness and sentiment (i.e., positive vs. negative). We evaluated the system with a diverse group of 56 online participants for a 10-day period. Participants submitted responses to career oriented prompts every other day. The participants were randomly split into two groups: 1) treatment - full feedback from the ROC Speak system; 2) control - written feedback from online peers. When judged by peers (p<.001) and independent raters (p<.05), participants from the treatment group demonstrated statistically significant improvement in overall speaking skills rating while the control group did not. Furthermore, in terms of speaking attributes, treatment group showed an improvement in friendliness (p<.001), vocal variety (p<.05) and articulation (p<.01)

Emotions in context: examining pervasive affective sensing systems, applications, and analyses

Pervasive sensing has opened up new opportunities for measuring our feelings and understanding our behavior by monitoring our affective states while mobile. This review paper surveys pervasive affect sensing by examining and considering three major elements of affective pervasive systems, namely; “sensing”, “analysis”, and “application”. Sensing investigates the different sensing modalities that are used in existing real-time affective applications, Analysis explores different approaches to emotion recognition and visualization based on different types of collected data, and Application investigates different leading areas of affective applications. For each of the three aspects, the paper includes an extensive survey of the literature and finally outlines some of challenges and future research opportunities of affective sensing in the context of pervasive computing

The Campbell Paradigm as a Behavior-Predictive Reinterpretation of the Classical Tripartite Model of Attitudes.

In this article, we introduce the Campbell Paradigm as a novel variant of Rosenberg and Hovlands (1960) tripartite model of attitudes. The Campbell Paradigm is based on a highly restricted measurement model that speaks of a compensatory relation between a persons latent attitude and the costs that come with any specific behavior. It overcomes the overarching weakness of the original tripartite model (i.e., its relative irrelevance for actual behavior) and offers a parsimonious explanation for behavior. Even though this seems attractive, we also discuss why the paradigm has not gained momentum in the 50 years since it was originally proposed by Donald T. Campbell. To demonstrate the paradigms suitability even when implemented with an unrefined instrument in a domain where it has not been used previously, we apply the paradigm to a classic data example from attitude research from the 1984 US presidential election to account for the electorates voting intentions and actual voting behaviors

Sentiment analysis tools should take account of the number of exclamation marks!!!

There are various factors that affect the sentiment level expressed in textual comments. Capitalization of letters tends to mark something for attention and repeating of letters tends to strengthen the emotion. Emoticons are used to help visualize facial expressions which can affect understanding of text. In this paper, we show the effect of the number of exclamation marks used, via testing with twelve online sentiment tools. We present opinions gathered from 500 respondents towards “like” and “dislike” values, with a varying number of exclamation marks. Results show that only 20% of the online sentiment tools tested considered the number of exclamation marks in their returned scores. However, results from our human raters show that the more exclamation marks used for positive comments, the more they have higher “like” values than the same comments with fewer exclamations marks. Similarly, adding more exclamation marks for negative comments, results in a higher “dislike”