Answering opinion questions on products by exploiting hierarchical organization of consumer reviews

Abstract

This paper proposes to generate appropriate answers for opinion questions about products by exploiting the hierarchical organization of consumer reviews. The hierarchy organizes product aspects as nodes following their parent-child relations. For each aspect, the reviews and corresponding opinions on this aspect are stored. We develop a new framework for opinion Questions Answering, which enables accurate question analysis and effective answer generation by making use the hierarchy. In particular, we first identify the (explicit/implicit) product aspects asked in the questions and their sub-aspects by referring to the hierarchy. We then retrieve the corresponding review fragments relevant to the aspects from the hierarchy. In order to generate appropriate answers from the review fragments, we develop a multi-criteria optimization approach for answer generation by simultaneously taking into account review salience, coherence, diversity, and parent-child relations among the aspects. We conduct evaluations on 11 popular products in four domains. The evaluated corpus contains 70,359 consumer reviews and 220 questions on these products. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. © 2012 Association for Computational Linguistics.