Mining the peanut gallery

The web contains a wealth of product reviews, but sifting through them is a daunting task. Ideally, an opinion mining tool would process a set of search results for a given item, generating a list of product attributes (quality, features, etc.) and aggregating opinions about each of them (poor, mixed, good). We begin by identifying the unique properties of this problem and develop a method for automatically distinguishing between positive and negative reviews. Our classifier draws on information retrieval techniques for feature extraction and scoring, and the results for various metrics and heuristics vary depending on the testing situation. The best methods work as well as or better than traditional machine…