Opinion mining from online hotel reviews - A text summarization approach

Online travel forums and social networks have become the most popular platform for sharing travel information, with enormous numbers of reviews posted daily. Automatically generated hotel summaries could aid travelers in selecting hotels. This study proposes a novel multi-text summarization technique for identifying the top-k most informative sentences of hotel reviews. Previous studies on review summarization have primarily examined content analysis, which disregards critical factors like author credibility and conflicting opinions. We considered such factors and developed a new sentence importance metric. Both the content and sentiment similarities were used to determine the similarity of two sentences. To identify the top-k sentences, the k-medoids clustering algorithm was used to partition sentences into k groups. The medoids from these groups were then selected as the final summarization results. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, we collected two sets of reviews for the two hotels posted on TripAdvisor.com. A total of 20 subjects were invited to review the text summarization results from the proposed approach and two conventional approaches for the two hotels. The results indicate that the proposed approach outperforms the other two, and most of the subjects believed that the proposed approach can provide more comprehensive hotel information. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.