Prof. Panos Ipeirotis
New York University

Friday January 14th, 2011
1:30 pm, 5317 Sennott Square
(Hosted by Alexandros Labrinidis)

Analyzing User-Generated Content using Econometrics

Abstract: Today, users post online reviews expressing their opinions for movies, restaurants, hotels, and many other products. They also evaluate merchants and react to news about political campaigns. Structuring and ranking these opinions in terms of importance and polarity is a difficult research problem. How can we infer the importance and polarity of the posted content? How can we structure and quantify the effect of the online opinions? Many existing approaches rely on human annotators to evaluate the polarity and strength of the opinions, a laborious and error- prone task. We take a different approach by considering the economic context in which an opinion is evaluated. We rely on the fact that the text in on-line systems influence the behavior of the readers and or product prices. Then, by reversing the logic, we infer the semantic orientation and the strength of an opinion by tracing the changes in the associated economic variable. In effect, we combine econometrics with text mining algorithms to identify the "economic value of text" and assign a "dollar value" to each opinion, quantifying sentiment effectively and without the need for manual effort. We present applications on reputation systems, online product reviews, and show how to improve search for hotels and products in general, using econometric approaches.

Bio: Panos Ipeirotis is an Associate Professor at the Department of Information, Operations, and Management Sciences at Leonard N. Stern School of Business of New York University. His recent research interests focus on crowdsourcing and on mining user-generated content on the Internet. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Columbia University in 2004, with distinction. He has received two "Best Paper" awards (IEEE ICDE 2005, ACM SIGMOD 2006), two "Best Paper Runner Up" awards (JCDL 2002, ACM KDD 2008), and is also a recipient of a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation.

Host: Alexandros Labrinidis
Refreshments will be served.

Web Link: http://www.cs.pitt.edu/events/talks/2114/talk.php?id=295
The Department of Computer Science is located at 210 S. Bouquet St.