Sentiment diversification for short review summarization

Abstract

With the abundance of reviews published on the Web about a given product, consumers are looking for ways to view major opinions that can be presented in a quick and succinct way. Reviews contain many different opinions, making the ability to show a diversified review summary that focus on coverage and diversity a major goal. Most review summarization work focuses on showing salient reviews as a summary which might ignore diversity in summaries. In this paper, we present a graph-based algorithm that is capable of producing extractive summaries that are both diversified from a sentiment point of view and topically well-covered. First, we use statistical measures to find topical words. Then we split the dataset based on the sentiment class of the reviews and perform the ranking on each sentiment graph. When compared with different baselines, our approach scores best in most ROUGE metrics. Specifically, our approach shows improvements of 3.9% in ROUGE-1 and 1.8% in ROUGE-L in comparison with the best competing baseline.