Cross-Domain Helpfulness Prediction of Online Consumer Reviews by Deep Learning Model

Customer reviews provide helpful information such as usage experiences or critiques; these are critical information resource for future customers. Since the amount of online review is getting bigger, people need a way to find the most helpful ones automatically. Previous studies addressed on the prediction of the percentage of the helpfulness voting results based on a regression model or classified them into a helpful or unhelpful classes. However, the voting result of an online review is not a constant over time, and we also find that there are many reviews getting zero vote. Therefore, we collect the voting results of the same online customer reviews over time, and observe the change of votes to find a better learning target. We collected a dataset with online reviews in five different product categories (“Apple”, “Video Game”, “Clothing, Shoes & Jewelry”, “Sports & Outdoors”, and “Prime Video”) from Amazon.com with the voting result on the helpfulness of the reviews, and monitor the helpfulness voting for six weeks. Experiments are conducted on the dataset to get a reasonable classification on the zero and non-zero vote reviews. We construct a classification system that can classify the online reviews via the deep learning model BERT. The results show that the classifier can get good result on the helpfulness prediction. We also test the classifier on cross-domain prediction and get promising results.