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.