Review Spotlight: A User Interface For Summarizing User-Generated Reviews Using Adjective-Noun Word Pairs

Many people read online reviews written by other users to learn more about a product or venue. However, the overwhelming amount of user-generated reviews and variance in length, detail and quality across the reviews make it difficult to glean useful information. In this paper, we present the iterative design of our system, called Review Spotlight. It provides a brief overview of reviews using adjective-noun word pairs, and allows the user to quickly explore the reviews in greater detail. Through a laboratory user study which required participants to perform decision making tasks, we showed that participants could form detailed impressions about restaurants and decide between two options significantly faster with Review Spotlight than with traditional review webpages.