A Multitude of Opinions: Mining Online Rating Data

Online rating system is a popular feature of Web 2.0 applications. It typically involves a set of reviewers assigning rating scores (based on various evaluation criteria) to a set of objects. We identify two objectives for research on online rating data, namely achieving effective evaluation of objects and learning behaviors of reviewers/objects. These two objectives have conventionally been pursued separately. We argue that the future research direction should focus on the integration of these two objectives, as well as the integration between rating data and other types of data.