An Attention Model of Customer Expectation to Improve Review Helpfulness Prediction

Qu, Xianshan; Li, Xiaopeng; Farkas, Csilla; Rose, John

Many people browse reviews online before making purchasing decisions. It is essential to identify the subset of helpful reviews from the large number of reviews of varying quality. This paper aims to build a model to predict review helpfulness automatically. Our work is inspired by the observation that a customer’s expectation of a review can be greatly affected by review sentiment and the degree to which the customer is aware of pertinent product information. Consequently, a customer may pay more attention to that specific content of a review which contributes more to its helpfulness from their perspective. To model such customer expectations and capture important information from a review text, we propose a novel neural network which leverages review sentiment and product information. Specifically, we encode the sentiment of a review through an attention module, to get sentiment-driven information from review text. We also introduce a product attention layer that fuses information from both the target product and related products, in order to capture the product related information from review text. Our experimental results show an AUC improvement of 5.4% and 1.5% over the previous state of the art model on Amazon and Yelp data sets, respectively.