Part-of-Speech Approach to Evaluation of Textbook Reviews

Book reviews are comments written by readers regarding their experiences about a particular book. Some reviews contain useful information and may help prospective buyers in making a purchase decision, while some are viewed as less helpful, such as, complaints about shipping delay. The review’s content is the key to differentiating them. Presenting a methodology for evaluating the helpfulness of a book view, this research employed the part-of-speech (POS) approach. A review’s content initially underwent a POS tagging process. Various features were then extracted and used as attributes for classification algorithms. The relation between adjectives and review’s helpfulness was also analyzed. The system’s effectiveness was assessed using textbook reviews obtained from an on-line bookstore.