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Gender, writing and ranking in review forums: a case study of the IMDb

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Abstract

Online review forums provide consumers with essential information about goods and services by facilitating word-of-mouth communication. Despite that preferences are correlated to demographic characteristics, reviewer gender is not often provided on user profiles. We consider the case of the internet movie database (IMDb), where users exchange views on movies. Like many forums, IMDb employs collaborative filtering such that by default, reviews are ranked by perceived utility. IMDb also provides a unique gender filter that displays an equal number of reviews authored by men and women. Using logistic classification, we compare reviews with respect to writing style, content and metadata features. We find salient differences in stylistic features and content between reviews written by men and women, as predicted by sociolinguistic theory. However, utility is the best predictor of gender, with women’s reviews perceived as being much less useful than those written by men. While we cannot observe who votes at IMDb, we do find that highly rated female-authored reviews exhibit “male” characteristics. Our results have implications for which contributions are likely to be seen, and to what extent participants get a balanced view as to “what others think” about an item.

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Notes

  1. Following [52], we define utility as the number of users who found a review useful divided by the total number of votes received (i.e., x/y).

  2. While there are other movie review corpora available (e.g., for studying sentiment analysis), we were not able to find existing data with author gender.

  3. Unlike in OLS regression, the pseudo \(R^2\) cannot be interpreted as the proportion of variance in the independent variable that is explained by the model; it is a simple measure of the strength of association between the predictors and the independent variable. Therefore, it is a useful guide in choosing an appropriate model, but has no literal interpretation.

  4. http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/02/02/ where-are-the-women-in-wikipedia

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Acknowledgments

We thank the anonymous reviewers who provided helpful feedback on this work, as well as the reviewers of an earlier version of this work, which appeared at ACM CIKM 2010. We also acknowledge the insightful advice of Alexia Panayiotou, as well as Mengyuan (Serena) Li’s assistance with data collection.

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  1. Department of Humanities, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL, 60616, USA

    Jahna Otterbacher

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Otterbacher, J. Gender, writing and ranking in review forums: a case study of the IMDb. Knowl Inf Syst 35, 645–664 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-012-0548-z

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