Sentence-Based Plot Classification for Online Review Comments

Many shopping sites provide functions to submit a user review for a purchased item. Reviews of items including stories such as novels and movies sometimes contain spoilers (undesired and revealing plot descriptions) along with the opinions of the review author. In this paper, we propose a system that helps users see reviews without seeing such plot descriptions. This system classifies each sentence in a user review as plot-related or non-plot-related and hides plot descriptions from user reviews. We tested five common machine-learning algorithms to ascertain the appropriate algorithm to address this problem. We also proposed a method of generalizing people's names, which we think is strongly related to the plot description. We verified its contribution to the classification results. Finally, we implemented a display interface of user reviews in which users can control the level of plot hiding.