Using Very Simple Statistics for Review Search: An Exploration

We report on work in progress on using very simple statistics in an unsupervised fashion to re-rank search engine results when review-oriented queries are issued; the goal is to bring opinionated or subjec- tive results to the top of the results list. We find that our proposed technique performs comparably to methods that rely on sophis- ticated pre-encoded linguistic knowledge, and that both substantially improve the ini- tial results produced by the Yahoo! search engine.