Multi-dimension reviewer credibility quantification across diverse travel communities

The rapid development of social media technologies enables travellers to share travel experiences and opinions online by posting reviews, which then serve as information source for other travellers. However, the explosive growth of reviews and the proliferation of uninformative, biased or even false information make it very challenging for travellers to find credible information. To help travellers seek credible information, most current work apply mainly qualitative approaches to investigate the credibility of reviews or reviewers. This paper adopts an Impact Index to quantify the credibility of reviewers by simultaneously evaluating the expertise and trustworthiness of reviewers based on the number of reviews posted by them and the number of helpful votes received by those reviews. Furthermore, the Impact Index is enhanced into the Exposure-Impact Index by considering in addition reviewers’ breadth of expertise in the form of the number of destinations on which reviewers posted reviews. To examine the effectiveness and applicability of Impact Index and Exposure-Impact Index, this paper evaluates them on several data sets collected from two rather different online travel communities: TripAdvisor, the world’s largest travel community, and Qunar, one of the most popular travel communities in China. Experimental results show that both Impact Index and Exposure-Impact Index lead to more consistent results with human judgments than the state-of-the-art method in measuring the credibility of reviewers from diverse communities, manifesting their effectiveness and applicability.