Predicting the Helpfulness Score of Product Reviews Using an Evidential Score Fusion Method

Everyday many online product sales websites and specialized reviewing forums publish a massive volume of human-generated product reviews. People use these reviews as valuable free source of knowledge when decide to buy products. Therefore, an accurate automated system for distinguishing useful reviews from non-useful ones is of great importance. This article presents a new model for specifying the usefulness of comments using the textual features extracted from the reviews. Various types of features including emotion-related, linguistic and text-related features, valence, arousal, and dominance (VAD) values, review-length and polarity of comments are exploited in this study. Moreover, two new algorithms are presented: an improved evidential algorithm for emotion recognition, and an algorithm for extracting VAD values for each review. Finally, the usefulness of reviews is predicted using the mentioned features and an improved Dempster–Shafer score fusion algorithm. The proposed method is applied to review datasets of Books and Video Games of Amazon. The results show that combining the features associated with emotions, features of VAD, and text-related features improves the accuracy of predicting the usefulness of reviews. Also, in comparison with the original Dempster–Shafer method, the precision of the improved Dempster–Shafer algorithm for both datasets is 15% and 11% higher, respectively.