Purpose

Experienced reviewers in general can produce high-quality product reviews, and thereby get more helpful votes. This paper explores the question that whether the depth and width of the reviewers' experience distribution have effects on the helpfulness of their reviews.

Design/methodology/approach

Adopting the restaurant review data from Yelp, the present paper classifies the restaurants in to different categories applying the Word2Vec technique, such as Asian or fast food. By evaluating the number of a user's historical reviews in a specific category, and the evenness of such distribution in different categories, the experience specialty and experience diversity are defined respectively.

Findings

The analysis shows that users specialised in a given category can produce more helpful reviews in that category. The users with diverse historical experience, i.e. have posted reviews for many categories, also can produce helpful reviews. In addition, the experience diversity shows a positive moderation effect on the influence of experience specialty. Thus, users with diverse experience while specialized in a particular category are the source of most helpful reviews.

Originality/value

While previous studies mostly consider the raw number of historical reviews as a reviewer's experience, we distinguish such experience by product category and focus on the width and depth of its distribution. The results not only shed lights on the mining of high-quality reviews and reviewers but also provide insights on the management of online review platforms and electronic marketing.

中文翻译：

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具有专业和多样化经验的消费者会产生更有帮助的评论

目的

一般来说，经验丰富的评论者可以产生高质量的产品评论，从而获得更多有用的投票。本文探讨了审稿人经验分布的深度和广度是否对其评论的有用性产生影响的问题。

设计/方法/方法

本文采用 Yelp 的餐厅评论数据，应用 Word2Vec 技术将餐厅分为不同类别，例如亚洲或快餐。通过评估用户在特定类别中的历史评论数量，以及在不同类别中分布的均匀性，分别定义了体验专业性和体验多样性。

发现

分析表明，专门从事给定类别的用户可以在该类别中产生更有帮助的评论。具有不同历史经验的用户，即发布过许多类别的评论，也可以产生有用的评论。此外，经验多样性对经验专业的影响具有正向调节作用。因此，具有不同经验但专门从事特定类别的用户是最有用的评论的来源。

原创性/价值

虽然之前的研究大多将历史评论的原始数量视为评论者的体验，但我们按产品类别区分此类体验，并关注其分布的宽度和深度。研究结果不仅为优质评论和评论者的挖掘提供了启示，也为在线评论平台和电子营销的管理提供了见解。