Web 2.0 Technology - More and More People Can Freely Express Their Opinions on the Web
As Web 2.
0 applications become increasingly popular, more and more people express their opinions on the Web in various ways such as customer reviews, forums, discussion groups, and Weblogs.
The wide coverage of topics and abundance of opinions make the Web an extremely valuable source for mining user opinions about all kinds of topics (e.
g.
, products, economic figures, etc.
).
However, with such a large scales of information source, it is quite challenging for a user to integrate and digest all the opinions from different sources.
In general, for any given topic (e.
g.
, a product), there are often two kinds of opinions: the first is opinions expressed in some well-structured relatively complete review typically written by some expert about the topic and the second is fragmental opinions scattering around in all kinds of sources such as blog articles and forums.
For convenience of discussion, we will refer to the first kind as expert opinions and the second ordinary opinions.
The expert opinions are relatively easy for a user to access through some opinion search website such as CNET.
Because a comprehensive product review is often written carefully, it is also easy for a user to digest expert opinions.
However, finding, integrating, and digesting ordinary opinions pose significant challenges as they are scattering in many different sources, and are generally fragmental and not well structured.
While expert opinions are clearly very useful, they may be biased and often out of date after a while.
In contrast, ordinary opinions tend to represent the general opinions of a large number of people and get refreshed quickly as people dynamically generate new content.
For example, a query "iPhone" returns 330,431 matches in Google's blog search (as of Nov.
1,2007), suggesting that there are many opinions expressed about iPhone in blog articles within a short period of time since it hit the market.
0 applications become increasingly popular, more and more people express their opinions on the Web in various ways such as customer reviews, forums, discussion groups, and Weblogs.
The wide coverage of topics and abundance of opinions make the Web an extremely valuable source for mining user opinions about all kinds of topics (e.
g.
, products, economic figures, etc.
).
However, with such a large scales of information source, it is quite challenging for a user to integrate and digest all the opinions from different sources.
In general, for any given topic (e.
g.
, a product), there are often two kinds of opinions: the first is opinions expressed in some well-structured relatively complete review typically written by some expert about the topic and the second is fragmental opinions scattering around in all kinds of sources such as blog articles and forums.
For convenience of discussion, we will refer to the first kind as expert opinions and the second ordinary opinions.
The expert opinions are relatively easy for a user to access through some opinion search website such as CNET.
Because a comprehensive product review is often written carefully, it is also easy for a user to digest expert opinions.
However, finding, integrating, and digesting ordinary opinions pose significant challenges as they are scattering in many different sources, and are generally fragmental and not well structured.
While expert opinions are clearly very useful, they may be biased and often out of date after a while.
In contrast, ordinary opinions tend to represent the general opinions of a large number of people and get refreshed quickly as people dynamically generate new content.
For example, a query "iPhone" returns 330,431 matches in Google's blog search (as of Nov.
1,2007), suggesting that there are many opinions expressed about iPhone in blog articles within a short period of time since it hit the market.
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