The Dangerous Myth of the Star System
In recent years we have observed two parallel trends in computational linguistics research and e-commerce development. On the research side, there has been an increasing interest in algorithms and approaches that are able to capture the polarity of opinions expressed by users on products, institutions and services. On the other hand, almost all big e-commerce and aggregator sites are by now providing users the possibility of writing comments and expressing their appreciation with a numeric score (usually represented as a number of stars). This generates the impression that the work carried out in the research community is made partially useless (at least for economic exploitation) by an evolution in web practices. In this paper we describe an experiment on a large corpus which shows that the score judgments provided by users are often conflicting with the text contained in the opinion, and to such a point that a rule-based opinion mining system can be demonstrated to perform better than the users themselves in ranking their opinions.
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