Mobile Service for Reputation Extraction from Weblogs - Public Experiment and Evaluation

In this paper, we introduce a mobile service that extracts reputations of a product from weblogs by cellular phones during shopping. If the user takes a photo of a product barcode on the package with a cellular phone camera, Ubiquitous Metadata Scouter first gets the product metadata (name, manufacturer, etc.) from the internet and collects blogs that review the product. Also, it analyzes the blog contents with NLP techniques and ontologies. Then, it indicates the overall reputation (positive or negative), and other related products that are the subject of much discussion in the blogs. This paper illustrates each function of this service and a public experiment and evaluation at a real consumer electronics store and book-store in Tokyo in March 2006.