A helpfulness modeling framework for electronic word-of-mouth on consumer opinion platforms

Electronic Word-of-Mouth (eWOM) is growing exponentially with the rapid development of electronic commerce. As a result, consumers are increasingly crowded by a huge amount of eWOM contents and therefore there is a need to automatically recommend eWOM contents that are helpful to them. Existing helpfulness assessment approaches that deterministically estimate the helpfulness of eWOM contents lack a generative formulation and are limited to the training set that has been voted by many readers. This article presents a rigorous probabilistic framework for inferring the "helpfulness" of eWOM contents which can build a "helpfulness" model from a low number of votes on eWOM contents. Furthermore, we introduce a measurement, "helpfulness" bias, as the benchmark for the "helpfulness" of eWOM documents. We also propose a model that exploits the graphical model and expectation maximization algorithm, under this probabilistic framework, to demonstrate the versatility of our framework. Our algorithm is compared experimentally to other existing helpfulness discovering algorithms and the experimental results show that our framework can effectively model the helpfulness of eWOM contents better than other approaches, and therefore indicate the capability of our framework to recommend helpful eWOMs to potential consumers.