Study Findings from National Research Council Broaden Understanding of Computing

By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Computer Weekly News -- Investigators discuss new findings in Computing. According to news reporting out of Pisa, Italy, by VerticalNews editors, research stated, "Online product reviews are increasingly being recognized as a gold mine of information for determining product and brand positioning, and more and more companies look for ways of digging this gold mine for nuggets of knowledge that they can then bring to bear in decision making. We present a software system, called StarTrack, that automatically rates a product review according to a number of 'stars,' i.e., according to how positive it is."

Our news journalists obtained a quote from the research from National Research Council, "In other words, given a text-only review (i.e., one with no explicit star-rating attached), StarTrack attempts to guess the star-rating that the reviewer would have attached to the review. StarTrack is thus useful for analysing unstructured word-of-mouth on products, such as the comments and reviews about products that are to be found in spontaneous discussion forums, such as newsgroups, blogs, and the like. StarTrack is based on machine learning technology, and as such does not require any re-programming for porting it from one product domain to another. Based on the star-ratings it attributes to reviews, StarTrack can subsequently rank the products in a given set according to how favourably they have been reviewed by consumers."

According to the news editors, the research concluded: "We present controlled experiments in which we evaluate, on two large sets of product reviews crawled from the Web, the accuracy of StarTrack at (i) star-rating reviews, and (ii) ranking the reviewed products based on the automatically attributed star-ratings."

For more information on this research see: StarTrack: The Next Generation (of Product Review Management Tools). New Generation Computing, 2013;31(1):47-70. New Generation Computing can be contacted at: Springer, 233 Spring St, New York, NY 10013, USA. (Springer - www.springer.com; New Generation Computing - www.springerlink.com/content/0288-3635/)

Our news journalists report that additional information may be obtained by contacting S. Baccianella, CNR, Ist Sci & Tecnol Informaz, I-56124 Pisa, Italy.

Keywords for this news article include: Pisa, Italy, Europe, Computing

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