A Technique for Summarizing Web Reviews

We propose a technique for summarizing Web reviews. Information summarization has become an important problem in the current content saturated world. One such example is the World Wide Web which provides a platform to publish and evaluate information. This collaborative nature of the Web has enabled users to write their opinion on certain topics and also evaluate others' opinions by assigning ranks. In this paper we show that the above aspect of Web can be utilized to generate more useful summary. We consider the problem of generating summary from the Web reviews and the rank (usefulness) assigned to these reviews by other users. We study the usefulness of user ranks in the summarization task. Based on the study, we propose a technique which takes ranked reviews as input and generates a summary. We experiment with different variations of the proposed technique and evaluate them based on different criteria.