Generating Tips from Product Reviews

Product reviews play a key role in e-commerce platforms. Studies show that many users read product reviews before purchase and trust them as much as personal recommendations. However, in many cases, the number of reviews per product is large and finding useful information becomes a challenging task. A few websites have recently added an option to post tips - short, concise, practical, and self-contained pieces of advice about products. These tips are complementary to the reviews and usually add a new non-trivial insight about the product, beyond its title, attributes, and description. Yet, most if not all major e-commerce platforms lack the notion of a tip as a first class citizen and customers typically express their advice through other means, such as reviews. In this work, we propose an extractive method for tip generation from product reviews. We focus on five popular e-commerce domains whose reviews tend to contain useful non-trivial tips that are beneficial for potential customers. We formally define the task of tip extraction in e-commerce by providing the list of tip types, tip timing (before and/or after the purchase), and connection to the surrounding context sentences. To extract the tips, we propose a supervised approach and provide a labeled dataset, annotated by human editors, over 14,000 product reviews using a dedicated tool. To demonstrate the potential of our approach, we compare different tip generation methods and evaluate them both manually and over the labeled set. Our approach demonstrates especially high performance for popular products in the Baby, Home Improvement and Sports & Outdoors domains, with precision of over 95% for the top 3 tips per product.

Automated summary

Product reviews are crucial in e-commerce, providing important information and recommendations. Some websites have started to add the option to post tips, which usually offer new insights about products. However, most e-commerce platforms do not consider tips as a distinct concept, with customers typically expressing advice through other means such as reviews.