Identifying the most influential topic-sensitive opinion leaders in online review communities

With the successful adoption of Web 2.0 applications, consumers are increasingly voicing their opinions and concerns, and providing suggestions in online review communities. Consumers who significantly influence the opinions and decisions of others through communicative acts are called opinion leaders. These leaders usually capture the most representative opinions and play a crucial role in electronic word-of-mouth. Since opinion leaders have different expertise and interests, they are typically topic sensitive. In this paper, we discuss the challenges of identifying topic-sensitive opinion leaders in online review communities, and present a two-stage approach. In Stage I, we derive opinion leaders' interest from their tags. In Stage II, we rank leaders according to not only the link structure of networks but also opinion leaders' personal expertise and interests. A preliminary experiment on real-world data indicates the proposed approach is effective.