1. Building reputation and trust using
federated search and opinion
mining
Somayeh Khatiban
School of Informatics

2. Agenda
• Definitions
• Reputation Systems
• Quality in Review Systems
• Trust in Review Systems
• Federated Search
•Research Question
• Methodology (Current Progress)

3. Definitions
Product Review Systems:
Rapid growth of online shopping and social media  reading
and writing opinions about products
• Online marketplaces (Amazon, eBay)
• Online review websites (CNET Reviews)
• Question & Answering websites (Yahoo! answers)
• Social media (facebook)

4. Definitions (Cont.)
Lightspeed Research survey: Where do people look for product
reviews?

5. Definitions (Cont.)
Boris discussed that people use social media in different ways
to find out about products. people do research on product
reviews through collaborative search.

6. Definitions
Product Review Systems: Opinion or view of one about
something (Reputation is also known as
rating, referrals, reviews, feedbacks and recommendations).
Online Reputation: The history of entities that inspire an
anticipation of future interaction.
Reputation based data: Data generated in the process of
tracking an entity’s actions and other entities’ opinions.

7. Reputation Data
Recommendations Target Entity
(Object)
Ratings
Comments
Reviews
Tags Feedbacks
Questions
&
Answers Rankings

8. Reputation Systems
Online Marketplaces
Amazon
eBay
Business Directories
Yelp
AllinLondon.co.uk
Review Systems
CNET
CanYouTrustThem.com

9. Example: When you want to find out more about a particular product
Dell Laptop D620
Amazon (Marketplace)
cnet (Review System)

10. Example: When you want to choose a product
A Projector
Amazon (Marketplace)
cnet (Review System)

11. Example: For finding an expert or a service
Harely Medical Group
All In London
(Business Directory)
CanYouTrustThem
(Review System)

12. Trust in Reputation Systems
• The quality of articles varies a lot because of many non-expert
writers
• The more attention to opinionated articles, the more spam
• Effect of source of opinions on trust and the factors to measure
them
• Which type of reputation is more trusted? (e.g. star rating,
review, recommendation) Is it also a trust factor?
• Factors to trust reviews provided by anonymous writers

13. Federated Search
An information retrieval technique that search multiple resources
rather simultaneously than a single centralised retrieval system
Online Business Social Q&A Tools
Marketplaces Directories Media
- Reviews - Feedbacks - Opinions - Opinions
- Star Ranking - Recommendations
-Recommendations - Tags
...
... ... ...

14. Research Question
How federated search can help to improve trust in opinion
mining?
Matching reviews from one domain to another

15. Matching reviews from Yelp (a review website) to objects in
Yahoo! Directory
Match unstructured text reviews to a structured list of objects.
Yelp.com Yahoo! Business Directory
299,762 reviews
12,408 objects

16. TF-IDF:
Query: Reviews Documents: Objects (Restaurant)
TF-IDF+:
Query: Objects (Restaurant) Documents: Reviews
RLM: Review Language Model

18. Methodology (Current progress of research)
Questionnaire survey to find out:
• How users face to enormous amount of opinions
• What types of reputations they trust more?
• Which sources of reputations they trust more?
• Which customer reviews they trust more?

19. Thank You
Comments?
Suggestions?