User Reviews and Language: How Language Influences Ratings
This addresses the issue for platforms and users relying on aggregated ratings, though it is incremental as it questions existing practices without proposing a new solution.
The paper tackles the problem of aggregating user reviews across multiple languages by analyzing rating correlations between different languages for London tourist attractions on TripAdvisor, finding generally high correlations but variations between language pairs.
The number of user reviews of tourist attractions, restaurants, mobile apps, etc. is increasing for all languages; yet, research is lacking on how reviews in multiple languages should be aggregated and displayed. Speakers of different languages may have consistently different experiences, e.g., different information available in different languages at tourist attractions or different user experiences with software due to internationalization/localization choices. This paper assesses the similarity in the ratings given by speakers of different languages to London tourist attractions on TripAdvisor. The correlations between different languages are generally high, but some language pairs are more correlated than others. The results question the common practice of computing average ratings from reviews in many languages.