Visualizing Reviews Summaries as a Tool for Restaurants Recommendation

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 (which themselves may be lengthy and not easy to read). 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 contribution of this study is twofold: First, it focuses on reviews of intangible services (using the restaurant domain as a case study), unlike most of the related studies that consider physical products. Second, it combines state-of-the-art text analysis techniques with an intuitive visualization into an easy to use prototype to visualize summarized service comparisons to the users.