Information Types in Product Reviews
This work addresses the need for more effective analysis and consumption of product reviews, though it is incremental as it builds on existing text classification methods.
The authors tackled the problem of characterizing information types in product reviews by developing a typology of 24 communicative goals and a zero-shot multi-label classifier, finding that this combination forecasts review helpfulness and sentiment while providing explanations.
Information in text is communicated in a way that supports a goal for its reader. Product reviews, for example, contain opinions, tips, product descriptions, and many other types of information that provide both direct insights, as well as unexpected signals for downstream applications. We devise a typology of 24 communicative goals in sentences from the product review domain, and employ a zero-shot multi-label classifier that facilitates large-scale analyses of review data. In our experiments, we find that the combination of classes in the typology forecasts helpfulness and sentiment of reviews, while supplying explanations for these decisions. In addition, our typology enables analysis of review intent, effectiveness and rhetorical structure. Characterizing the types of information in reviews unlocks many opportunities for more effective consumption of this genre.