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International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence

ICAART 2016: Agents and Artificial Intelligence pp 56–72Cite as

From Reviews to Arguments and from Arguments Back to Reviewers’ Behaviour

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 10162))

Abstract

Our aim is to understand reviews from the point of view of the arguments they contain, and then do a first step from how arguments are distributed in such reviews towards the behaviour of the reviewers that posted them. We consider 253 reviews of a selected product (a ballet tutu for kids), extracted from the “Clothing, Shoes and Jeweller” section of Amazon.com. We explode these reviews into arguments, and we study how their characteristics, e.g., the distribution of positive (in favour of purchase) and negative ones (against purchase), change through a period of four years. Among other results, we discover that negative arguments tend to permeate also positive reviews. As a second step, by using such observations and distributions, we successfully replicate the reviewers’ behaviour by simulating the review-posting process from their basic components, i.e., the arguments themselves.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/01/25/how-amazon-should-fix-its-reviews-problem/.

  2. 2.

    http://www.amazon.com.

  3. 3.

    http://www.ebay.com.

  4. 4.

    http://www.bizrate.com.

  5. 5.

    http://www.epinions.com.

  6. 6.

    http://www.msnbc.com.

  7. 7.

    http://slashdot.org.

  8. 8.

    Courtesy of Julian McAuley and SNAP project (source: http://snap.stanford.edu/data/web-Amazon.html and https://snap.stanford.edu).

  9. 9.

    Polarisation only on specific issues has already been observed in many off-line contexts, see [3].

  10. 10.

    We used the R poweRlaw package for heavy tailed distributions (developed by Colin Gillespie [12]).

  11. 11.

    We used the relatively conservative choice that the power law is ruled out if \(pvalue = 0.1\) [6].

  12. 12.

    https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/.

  13. 13.

    http://www.scala-lang.org.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Economia e Management, Università di Brescia, Brescia, Italy

    Simone Gabbriellini

  2. Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica, Università di Perugia, Perugia, Italy

    Francesco Santini

Authors
  1. Simone Gabbriellini
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  2. Francesco Santini
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Correspondence to Francesco Santini .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Jaap van den Herik

  2. Polytechnic Institute of Setúbal/INSTICC, Setúbal, Portugal

    Joaquim Filipe

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Gabbriellini, S., Santini, F. (2017). From Reviews to Arguments and from Arguments Back to Reviewers’ Behaviour. In: van den Herik, J., Filipe, J. (eds) Agents and Artificial Intelligence. ICAART 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10162. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53354-4_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53354-4_4

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-53354-4

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