Effect of Toxic Review Content on Overall Product Sentiment
This addresses the impact of toxic reviews on consumer perception for e-commerce platforms, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to new data.
The study investigated how toxic review content affects overall product sentiment, finding that comment toxicity negatively influences product sentiment but does not mediate reviewer scores on sector-wise ratings.
Toxic contents in online product review are a common phenomenon. A content is perceived to be toxic when it is rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable and make individuals leave the discussion. Machine learning algorithms helps the sell side community to identify such toxic patterns and eventually moderate such inputs. Yet, the extant literature provides fewer information about the sentiment of a prospective consumer on the perception of a product after being exposed to such toxic review content. In this study, we collect a balanced data set of review comments from 18 different players segregated into three different sectors from google play-store. Then we calculate the sentence-level sentiment and toxicity score of individual review content. Finally, we use structural equation modelling to quantitatively study the influence of toxic content on overall product sentiment. We observe that comment toxicity negatively influences overall product sentiment but do not exhibit a mediating effect over reviewer score to influence sector-wise relative rating.