A multimedia interface for facilitating comparisons of opinions.

ABSTRACTWritten opinion on products and other entities can be important to consumers and researchers, but expensive and difficult to analyze. We present a multimedia interface designed to facilitate the analysis of opinions on multiple entities, which could be beneficial to many individuals and organizations. It integrates an information visualization and an intelligent system that selects notable comparisons in the data and summarizes them in text. This system applies a set of statistics for comparing opinions across entities. We conducted a study of our interface with 36 subjects. Subjects liked the visualization overall and our system's selections overlapped with those of subjects more than did the selections of baseline systems. Given the choice, subjects often changed their selections to be more consistent with those of our system. This suggests that system selections were valuable to them.