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-theart text analysis techniques with an intuitive visualization into an easy to use prototype to visualize summarized service comparisons to the users. The system's usefulness and intuitiveness were confirmed in multiple user studies.