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Schaal, Markus
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Schaal, Markus
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Schaal, Markus
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Now showing 1 - 10 of 13
- PublicationCombining similarity and sentiment in opinion mining for product recommendation(Springer, 2016-04)
; ; ; ; In the world of recommender systems, so-called content-based methods are an important approach that rely on the availability of detailed product or item descriptions to drive the recommendation process. For example, recommendations can be generated for a target user by selecting unseen products that are similar to the products that the target user has liked or purchased in the past. To do this, content-based methods must be able to compute the similarity between pairs of products (unseen products and liked products, for example) and typically this is achieved by comparing product features or other descriptive elements. The approach works well when product descriptions are readily available and when they are detailed enough to afford an effective similarity comparison. But this is not always the case. Detailed product descriptions may not be available since they can be expensive to create and maintain. In this article we consider another source of product descriptions in the form of the user-generated reviews that frequently accompany products on the web. We ask whether it is possible to mine these reviews, unstructured and noisy as they are, to produce useful product descriptions that can be used in a recommendation system. In particular we describe a novel approach to product recommendation that harnesses not only the features that can be mined from user-generated reviews but also the expressions of sentiment that are associated with these features. We present a recommendation ranking strategy that combines similarity and sentiment to suggest products that are similar but superior to a query product according to the opinion of reviewers, and we demonstrate the practical benefits of this approach across a variety of Amazon product domains.2146Scopus© Citations 53 - PublicationMining Experiential Product Cases(2013-07-11)
; ; ; Case-based reasoning (CBR) attempts to reuse past experiences to solve new problems. CBR ideas are commonplace in recommendation systems, which rely on the similarity between product queries and a case base of product cases. But, the relationship between CBR and many of these recommenders can be tenuous: the idea that product cases made up of static meta-data type features are experiential is a stretch; unless one views the type of case descriptions used by collaborative filtering (user ratings across products) as experiential. Here we explore and evaluate how to automatically generate product cases from user-generated reviews to produce cases that are based on genuine user experiences for use in a case-based product recommendation system.200 - PublicationThe Reviewer's Assistant: Recommending Topics to Writers by Association Rule Mining and Case-base Reasoning(2012-09-17)
; ; ; 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. 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 extended abstract 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.199 - PublicationExploiting Extended Search Sessions for Recommending Search Experiences in the Social Web(Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2012-09-03)
; ; ; ; HeyStaks is a case-based social search system that allows users to create and share case bases of search experiences (called staks) and uses these staks as the basis for result recommendations at search time. These recommendations are added to conventional results from Google and Bing so that searchers can benefit from more focused results from people they trust on topics that matter to them. An important point of friction in HeyStaks is the need for searchers to select their search context (that is, their active stak) at search time. In this paper we extend previous work that attempts to eliminate this friction by automatically recommending an active stak based on the searchers context (query terms, Google results, etc.) and demonstrate significant improvements in stak recommendation accuracy.525Scopus© Citations 4 - PublicationMining Features and Sentiment from Review Experiences(Springer, 2013-07-11)
; ; ; ; Supplementing product information with user-generated content such as ratings and reviews can help to convert browsers into buyers. As a result this type of content is now front and centre for many major e-commerce sites such as Amazon. We believe that this type of content can provide a rich source of valuable information that is useful for a variety of purposes. In this work we are interested in harnessing past reviews to support the writing of new useful reviews, especially for novice contributors. We describe how automatic topic extraction and sentiment analysis can be used to mine valuable information from user-generated reviews, to make useful suggestions to users at review writing time about features that they may wish to cover in their own reviews. We describe the results of a live-user trial to show how the resulting system is capable of delivering high quality reviews that are comparable to the best that sites like Amazon have to offer in terms of information content and helpfulness.439Scopus© Citations 9 - PublicationThe Curated Web: A Recommendation ChallengeIn this paper we consider the application of content-based recommendation techniques to web curation services which allow users to curate and share topical collections of content (e.g. images, news, web pages etc.). Curation services like Pinterest are now a mainstay of the modern web and present a range of interesting recommendation challenges. In this paper we consider the task of recommending collections to users and evaluate a range of different content-based techniques across a variety of content signals. We present the results of a large-scale evaluation using data from the Scoop.it web page curation service
172Scopus© Citations 5 - PublicationTowards an intelligent reviewer's assistant: recommending topics to help users to write better product reviews(ACM, 2012-02-14)
; ; ; ; User opinions and reviews are an important part of the modern web and all major e-commerce sites typically provide their users with the ability to provide and access customer reviews across their product catalog. Indeed this has become a vital part of the service provided by sites like Amazon and TripAdvisor, so much so that many of us will routinely check appropriate product reviews before making a purchase decision, regardless of whether we intend to purchase online or not. The importance of reviews has highlighted the need to help users to produce better reviews and in this paper we describe the development and evaluation of a Reviewer's Assistant for this purpose. We describe a browser plugin that is designed to work with major sites like Amazon and to provide users with suggestions as they write their reviews. These suggestions take the form of topics (e.g. product features) that a reviewer may wish to write about and the suggestions automatically adapt as the user writes their review. We describe and evaluate a number of different algorithms to identify useful topics to recommend to the user and go on to describe the results of a preliminary live-user trial.483Scopus© Citations 14 - PublicationRecommending topics for web curationA new generation of curation services provides users with a set of tools to manually curate and manage topical collections of content. However, given curation is ultimately a manual effort, it still requires significant effort on the part of the curator both in terms of collecting and managing content. We are interested in providing additional assistance to users in their curation tasks, in particular when it comes to efficiently adding content to their collection, and examine recommender systems in an effort to automate this task. We examine a number of recommendation strategies using live-user data from the popular Scoop.it curation service.
372Scopus© Citations 4 - PublicationHarnessing the Experience Web to Support User-Generated Product Reviews(Springer, 2012-09-03)
; ; ; ; 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.570Scopus© Citations 4 - PublicationOpinionated Product Recommendation(Springer, 2013-07-11)
; ; ; ; In this paper we describe a novel approach to case-based product recommendation. It is novel because it does not leverage the usual static, feature-based, purely similarity-driven approaches of traditional case-based recommenders. Instead we harness experiential cases, which are automatically mined from user generated reviews, and we use these as the basis for a form of recommendation that emphasises similarity and sentiment. We test our approach in a realistic product recommendation setting by using live-product data and user reviews.724Scopus© Citations 42