Helping customers make the most out of product reviews: A framework for visualizing service comparisons – A case study using restaurants

Online customers’ opinions about products and services, in the form of reviews, are a major part of today’s web culture. However, customers, when looking for a product or service, do not have the time or the desire to read even a small part of the available product reviews. Moreover, they often would like to examine reviews of similar products, and get a comprehensive picture of how different aspects of these products compare. In this work, by introducing a generic framework for analyzing and presenting a visual summary based on comparative sentences extracted from customer reviews, we offer the user an easy and intuitive understanding of the differences between a set of products. The contributions of this study if twofold: First, it focusses on reviews of services (using the restaurant domain as a case study), unlike most of the related studies that consider tangible products and second, it combines state-of-the-art text analysis techniques with an intuitive visualization into a n easy to use prototype to visualize summarized service comparisons to the users.