University of Southern California

NL Seminar-Discovering Latent Similarities in Car Models Based On Customer Reviews: Towards a Consumer-Driven Product Recommendation System

When:
Friday, June 22, 2012, 03:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Where:
11th Floor Conf. Room (#1135)
Speaker:
Vita Markman (Disney Interactive)
Description:

Abstract:
This pilot study explores the hypothesis that customer reviews of cars can be used to create and/or fine tune a recommendation system that offers a list of ranked top-N matches for a given vehicle. Our main premise is that positive or negative reviews invariably focus on the features relevant to the car being reviewed and hence can be used to uncover subtle similarities among various car models, as well as discover macro-types of cars (e.g. family cars, luxury, high performance sports etc). To discover similar models based on reviews we propose a Weighted Dice Coefficient which weighs each shared or non-shared word token by its tf-idf score. Closest top five cars are then discovered for each of the 226 reviewed car models. We also show that integrating tf-idf scores into the similarity metric improves the accuracy of the top five picks, as compared to the standard Dice Coefficient.

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