Helpfulness of product reviews as a function of discrete positive and negative emotions

The product review plays an important role in customer’s purchase decision making process on the e-commerce websites. Emotions can significantly influence the way that reviews are processed. The importance of discrete emotions embedded in online reviews and their impact on review helpfulness is not explored intensively in prior studies. This study builds a helpfulness predictive model using deep neural network and investigates the influences of emotions that contribute to review helpfulness. We present an approach that extract novel discrete positive and negative emotion features from textual content of product reviews using NRC emotion Lexicon. In addition, the type of product, reviewer, visibility, readability, linguistics and sentiment related characteristics are also used for comparison and helpfulness prediction. The experimental results on two real-life datasets demonstrate that positive emotion features are the best predictors when individual category of feature is considered. However, negative emotion features and visibility features have comparable performance. Furthermore, the hybrid set of features with positive emotion features produce the best predictive performance for helpfulness of online reviews. The empirical evaluation finds that Trust, Joy and Anticipation (positive emotions); Anxiety and Sadness (negative emotions) are most influential emotion dimensions and have greater impact on perceived helpfulness. The findings of this study highlight the importance of emotions in online reviews and have significant implications for consumer and e-commerce retailers.