"Don't cry for me, Sept 17th, 2007

Google"

Semantic analysis of travel reviews

to understand feelings
Let me tell you...I
would highly Boris Galitsky
recommend that
unless you are a My dog is better
behaved than
Kango.com
party animal, a
heavy drinker most kids I saw
in this hotel

I would not let

my dog to
I ate a 3.5 pound lobster for just $16.99
search at
at the seafood restaurant inside the hotel
Google
which is the only thing I felt good about.
 Conventional search engines
• Deliver documents which include significant occurrences of
keywords in user queries.
• Additionally, Google is good
at selecting those documents
which has satisfied users in
previous similar searches.
• Powerset is trying to
understand linguistic links
between words in queries By using domain
and documents knowledge (ontology)
• While this works well enough
for general horizontal
searches, vertical searches
for specific kinds of products
can do much better.
Horizontal (about everything)
 Ontologies for vertical search
• Computers cannot really “know” what each word “means”
• However, we can teach
Dive in Monterey
them how entities are
related to each other
activity location
• In a vertical search, for
every word (or entity,
Relationship = ‘performed at’
denoted by it) there
should be coded
relationships with other
words
dive - boat
• Then the index for each
document contains
dive - lesson
multiple inter-related
entities : skeleton of a dive – deep - oxygen
 To recommend a product
• It is very convincing to refer to the experience of those who
used it before
• To provide argumentation why this product is good for
particular user, having discovered it suited well similar users
a search engine must not only "understand" the features of products
such as a hotel close to outdoor activities, but also feeling of people
about these products like not impressed with a view but nice for
guys' getaway.

It is not a opposite is understood

recommendation
 To handle recommendation queries
a search engine must know that:
 hotels are characterized with locations,
 sometimes good locations are those which are close to activities ( in particular,
outdoor activities).
 “views” are important considerations while staying in hotels,
 expression "not impressed" refers to a negative feeling, which is nevertheless
combined with positive reference to the category such as "guys getaway".
 Understanding sarcastic expressions
It is also necessary to understand sarcastic expressions like:

=> Not clean

=> Dogs are not allowed

 Technology: using semantic templates

Pos1 Pos0.5 Neg1 Neg0.5 Amplifier Mental Not No Domain

nouns
Domain
N A N A N A N A 1Arg 2Arg
adjectives
Returning
Letting/
allowing

Not good for dogs

pool Will not come back
Not Pos Domain Neg Ret -
N N -
Neg Ret Amplifier Never come back -
The would not let my dogs in Not a nice pool

Not Let They Domain Not Pos Domain - Not Neg Doman
N - +
Shower was not bad

I would not let my dogs in – so dirty

Not Pos Domain Return Not Pos Domain Mental
Not Let I Domain Neg1 1arg
N A 0 Would not return to this beach -
Did not know about this beach

They let their dogs bark all night

Not Pos Domain Mental
Let They Domain Neg1 2arg
N V 0 They did not recommend this beach
A traveler profile

Confidential - Contains Trade Secrets

Positive and negative sentiments

Confidential - Contains Trade Secrets

 Overview: we understand facts and feelings
about travel products and pages
• Why: we know how to link the underlying facts and consumer feelings about a product to return
recommendations relevant to the consumers’ explicit and implicit intentions

• Example: Portola Plaza is the top family hotel because it is rated highly:
– Based on quantifiable facts - it has a pool with a slide, kids eat and stay free and it has an
endorsement from parenting magazine. It also has kitchenettes and babysitting available
– Based on the feelings about the hotel -15% of reviews mentioned the children enjoyed it
e.g. “great little indoor pool and jacuzzi which my kids loved”, “family friendly, easy access
to state parks”, “right on the beach, very family friendly” and “staff was attentive to my kids”

• How - based on our ontology, we extracted facts & feelings about products:
– Used natural language processing to extract consumers and experts feelings from reviews,
blogs and articles
– Applied rule-based reasoning to derive data and meta-data from underlying facts and match
them against consumers intentions and themes
– Mined guidebooks and other offline sources for facts and feelings not online
– Created a search relevancy algorithm that marries the extracts of feelings, the derived data,
and facts to match them against the consumer’s intention and theme-based intentions

• Why our results are better:

– Ontology required to represent facts and feelings cannot be scaled up for horizontal search
– Most vertical searches do not integrate facts and feelings into the form which can be
matched against user queries