Impact of Comment Summarization on Decision-Making Process: An Experimental Study

Online comments play a key role in influencing people's decision-making, but an increase in their number can lead to a random decision-making process. Comment Summarization (CS) aims to provide a quick and informative overview of the comments without having to read all the original comments. This study used online hotel customer comments to generate summarized comments using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. The objective is to investigate the influence of these summaries on the customers' attitudes toward the hotel and booking intentions. The generated comments summaries are used to conduct an online survey where participants rate hotels under two conditions: one with real comments and another with comments summaries. The results showed that CS influences users' perceptions, ratings, and decision times when booking a room's hotel. However, development of robust summarization techniques is needed to ensure that summaries provide an accurate representation of the original comments.