Harnessing the Experience Web to Support User-Generated Product Reviews

Today, online reviews for products and services have become an important class of user-generated content and they play a valuable role for countless online businesses by helping to convert casual browsers into informed and satisfied buyers. In many respects, the content of user reviews is every bit as important as the catalog content that describes a given product or service. As users gravitate towards sites that offer insightful and objective reviews, the ability to source helpful reviews from a community of users is increasingly important. In this work we describe the Reviewer’s Assistant, a case-based reasoning inspired recommender system designed to help people to write more helpful reviews on sites such as Amazon and TripAdvisor. In particular, we describe two approaches to helping users during the review writing process and evaluate each as part of a blind live-user study. Our results point to high levels of user satisfaction and improved review quality compared to a control-set of Amazon reviews.