Name
Title | ||
|---|---|---|
Was this review helpful to you?: it depends! context and voting patterns in online content |
Abstract | ||
|---|---|---|
When a website hosting user-generated content asks users a straightforward question - \"Was this content helpful?\" with one \"Yes\" and one \"No\" button as the two possible answers - one might expect to get a straightforward answer. In this paper, we explore how users respond to this question and find that their responses are not quite straightforward after all. Using data from Amazon product reviews, we present evidence that users do not make absolute, independent voting decisions based on individual review quality alone. Rather, whether users vote at all, as well as the polarity of their vote for any given review, depends on the context in which they view it - reviews receive a larger overall number of votes when they are 'misranked', and the polarity of votes becomes more positive/negative when the review is ranked lower/higher than it deserves. We distill these empirical findings into a new probabilistic model of rating behavior that includes the dependence of rating decisions on context. Understanding and formally modeling voting behavior is crucial for designing learning mechanisms and algorithms for review ranking, and we conjecture that many of our findings also apply to user behavior in other online content-rating settings. |
Year | DOI | Venue |
|---|---|---|
2014 | 10.1145/2566486.2567998 | WWW |
Keywords | Field | DocType |
independent voting decision,online content,rating behavior,amazon product review,users vote,individual review quality,voting behavior,user behavior,voting pattern,straightforward answer,review ranking,straightforward question,ranking,user generated content | Data mining,Internet privacy,Computer science,Artificial intelligence,Conjecture,User-generated content,World Wide Web,Voting,Ranking,Human computation,Statistical model,Product reviews,Voting behavior,Machine learning | Conference |
Citations | PageRank | References |
15 | 0.84 | 16 |
Authors | ||
3 | ||
Name | Order | Citations | PageRank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ruben Sipos | 1 | 77 | 4.38 |
| Arpita Ghosh | 2 | 1745 | 131.77 |
| Thorsten Joachims | 3 | 17387 | 1254.06 |