CAPRA: a comprehensive approach to product ranking using customer reviews

Online shopping generates billions of dollars in revenues, including both the physical goods and online services. Product images and associated descriptions are the two main sources of information used by the shoppers to gain knowledge about a product. However, these two pieces of information may not always present the true picture of the product. Images could be deceiving, and descriptions could be overwhelming or cryptic. Moreover, the relative rank of these products among the peers may lead to inconsistencies. Hence, a useful and widely used piece of information is “user reviews”. A number of vendors like Amazon have created whole ecosystems around user reviews, thereby boosting their revenues. However, extracting the relevant and useful information out of the plethora of reviews is not straight forward, and is a very tedious job. In this paper we propose a product ranking system that facilitates the online shopping experience by analyzing the reviews for sentiments, evaluating their usefulness, extracting and weighing different product features and aspects, ranking it among similar comparable products, and finally creating a unified rank for each product. Experiment results show the usefulness of our proposed approach in providing an effective and reliable online shopping experience in comparison with similar approaches.