Aggregating Customer Review Attributes for Online Reputation Generation

In this paper, we face the problem of generating reputation for movies, products, hotels, restaurants and services by mining customer reviews expressed in natural language. To the best of our knowledge, previous studies on reputation generation for online entities have primarily examined semantic and sentiment orientation of customer reviews, disregarding other useful information that could be extracted from reviews, such as review helpfulness and review time. Therefore, we propose a new approach that combines review helpfulness, review time, review attached rating and review sentiment orientation for the purpose of generating a single reputation value toward various entities. The contribution of the paper is threefold. First, we design two equations to compute review helpfulness and review time scores, and we fine-tune Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model to predict the review sentiment orientation probability. Second, we design a formula to assign a numerical score to each review. Then, we propose a new formula to compute reputation value toward the target entity (movie, product, hotel, restaurant, service, etc). Finally, we propose a new form to visualize reputation that depicts numerical reputation value, opinion categories, top positive review and top negative review. Experimental results coming from several real-world data sets of miscellaneous domains collected from IMDb, TripAdvisor and Amazon websites show the effectiveness of the proposed method in generating and visualizing reputation compared to three state-of-the-art reputation systems.