What's in a Travel Review Title? Silvia De Ascaniis, Ulrike ... - IFITT

05.03.2012
Problem
Theoretical
foundation
Methodology
Results
What’s in a Travel Review Title?
Silvia De Ascaniis
Webatelier.net
Faculty of Communication Sciences
University of Lugano - USI, Switzerland
silvia.de.ascaniis@usi.ch
Problem
(Online) Information search is a time
consuming activity people select online
resources on the base of a first impression of
search results metadata (URL, date, title,
etc.) are used to shape the first impression
Ulrike Gretzel
Institute for Innovation in Business and Social Research
University of Wollongong, Australia
ugretzel@uow.edu.au
When selecting an Online Travel Review (OTR),
users might only browse through titles:
are OTR titles representative of the
respective texts?
do they provide useful cues for OTR
selection?
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Problem
Theoretical
foundation
Methodology
Results
Problem
Theoretical
foundation
Methodology
Results
Research Questions
AIM: to investigate some basic features of OTR titles, i.e.:
a. Length: can systematic differences in length be discovered
based on certain OTR characteristics?
b. Informativeness: do OTR titles help the reader to figure out
what the review is about?
c. Orientation: do OTR titles with a +/- connotation correspond
to reviews with a +/- rating?
d. Diversity: how diverse is the information contained in OTR
titles, and which are the words and constructs most frequently
used?
e. Communicative function: which is the function of the title in
the review economy?
ENTER 2012 Research Track Slide Number 3
Theoretical foundations
A review is a specific textual genre having its
proper characteristics, which are determined by its
intended function.
Indications given by
the online platform
Author’s motivations
for writing a review
Every communicative act is produced to address an
interlocutor
the general reason for writing a review is for it to be read!
“I would like to know
which attractions in
Sydney are worth a visit. I
will look at a couple of
online reviews!”
Which communicative strategies are used by the authors of
OTRs to make their texts attractive for an unknown audience?
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Problem
Theoretical
foundation
Theoretical foundation
Role of headlines in newspapers:
‣ to catch readers’ curiosity and
provoke them to go on reading
Methodology
‣ to help readers receive the best deal
of information with the least cognitive
effort
Results
ROLE OF TITLES IN OTR
Role of taglines in advertisements:
‣ to catch consumers’ attention
‣ to create the first impression of the
product
‣ to make consumers remember the
product
‣ anticipate something about the text
‣ arouse readers’ interest
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Problem
Theoretical
foundation
Data Corpus
• Reviews from TripAdvisor.com
• reporting experiences at three big city destinations
• collected until September 3 rd , 2011
Total N° of reviews in the Travel Guide
section
Rome Sydney Paris Total
9734 2231 10084 22049
N° of reviews in the “destination group” 1012 240 887 2139
N° of reviews after the filtering 701 173 600 1474
% of tot
N°
Reviews in English 470 109 345 924 62.7%
Reviews in German 134 52 119 305 20.7%
Reviews in French 33 0 46 79 5.4%
Reviews in Italian 64 12 90 166 11.3%
N° of reviews with rating 4 (very good) or
5 (excellent)
589 169 504 1262 85.6%
N° of reviews with rating 3 (average) 34 3 46 83 5.6%
N° of reviews with rating 2 (poor) or 1
(terrible)
Methodology
Results
78 1 50 129 8.8%
ENTER 2012 Research Track Slide Number 6
Problem
Theoretical
foundation
Methodology
Results
Problem
Theoretical
foundation
Methodology
Results
Classification criteria:
Coding procedure
‣ Rating = the overall rating provided by the review author for the
destination: 1 = terrible, 2 = poor, 3 = average, 4 = very good, 5 = excellent
‣ Language = English, German, French, Italian.
Methodology – Analysis
UAM Corpus Tool
= a software for human and semi-automatic annotation of texts and images.
It allows to explore linguistic patterns and linguistic features in a text.
‣ Connotation = the overall orientation of the title: positive, negative, notapplicable
(the title was not univocally polarized or was ambiguously
formulated), neutral (the title had not any recognizable evaluative connotation)
Manual coding, because:
- semantic nuances needed to be caught
- coders were representative of actual Internet users
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Problem
Theoretical
foundation
Methodology
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Problem
Theoretical
foundation
Methodology
Results
Average length = 4.4 words per title
maximum length =17 words
Average
length
Positive
connotation
(tot.
887/1474)
Negative
connotation
(tot.
143/1474)
LENGTH
Neutral
(tot.
143/1474)
Notapplicable
(94/1474)
Rome Paris Sydney
4.4 4.9 3.8 5.4 4.5 4.3 4.4
INFORMATIVENESS
Lexical Density = a measure of the density of information in any passage of text,
according to how tightly the lexical items (e.g. nouns, verbs) have been packed into the
grammatical structure:
‣ measured as the number of lexical items (Nlex) divided by the total number of words
per clause (N): Ld = (Nlex / N) x100
‣ LD of spoken language tends to be lower than that of written language
‣ LD varies from language to language, UAM Corpus Tool limited to English
Average N°
of words
Positive Negative
rating rating
(1262/1474) (129/1474)
4.3 4.6 4.6
Average
rating
(83/1474)
Less words are used for introducing a
positive experience at a destination than
for depicting a negative or average
impression negative judgments need
to be convincingly supported
LD per English title =65% nearly 3 out of 5 words are words which
communicate univocal information (42% in normal written English)
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Problem
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Methodology
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Problem
Theoretical
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Methodology
Results
Review rating
REVIEW ORIENTATION
Title Connotation
Positive Neutral Not-applicable Negative
4 (very good) or 5 (excellent) 98.0% 87.7% 68.1% 14.7%
3 (average) 1.2% 7.4% 16.0% 63.0%
1 (terrible) or 2 (poor) 0.8% 4.9% 16.0% 22.4%
MOST FREQUENT WORDS
Token Total frequency Rome Sydney Paris
City/Stadt/città/ville 324 147 49 128
Rome/Rom/Roma 316 316 0 0
Paris/Parigi 288 0 0 288
Amazing/great/wonderful/toll 93 50 16 27
Beautiful/schöne/bella/belle 64 44 10 20
Sydney 62 0 62 0
Titles with positive connotations are significantly linked to reviews with
positive ratings and titles with negative connotations only somewhat
correspond to reviews with negative ratings.
Titles often refer to the destination.
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Problem
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Problem
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Methodology
Results
WORD DIVERSITY
Token Total frequency Rome Sydney Paris
Amazing/great/wonderful/toll 93 50 16 27
Beautiful/schöne/bella/belle 64 44 10 20
World/welt/mondo/monde 57 22 22 13
Favorite/favourite 55 27 7 21
Eternal/ewige/eternelle/eterna 43 43 0 0
Love/liebe/amour/amore 41 11 0 30
Trip 37 17 2 18
Visit 32 19 4 9
Tour 32 10 3 19
Romantic/romatisch/romantica 27 8 0 19
Time 22 12 5 5
frequency counts are very low, suggesting a great diversity of words being used in the titles
strong use of superlatives and slogans persuasive reason
positive words much more frequent than negative ones
highlight one of the destination features
meta-words pertaining to the experience of travelling
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COMMUNICATIVE FUNCTIONS
They were investigated observing the representativeness of lexical patterns, specifically:
- temporal nouns and temporal adverbs to give temporal indications (e.g. “Rome in
winter”, “Paris in 3 days”);
- evaluative adjectives to evaluate or describe the tourism experience (“Great city”,
“Romantic Paris”);
- comparative adjectives to express expectations (e.g. “Better than expected”)
- personal pronouns to give personal judgments (e.g. “We loved Rome!”) or
recommendations (“Go to Paris!”)
descriptive words are much more common than comparative words or words that
suggest a direct advice addressed to the reader
1st person pronouns are more common than 2nd person pronouns, indicating that
most titles represent a summary statement of a personal experience or a general
destination description
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SUMMARY
• OTR titles are short, lexically dense statements
that often include the destination name but also a
diversity of other words.
• They mostly summarize personal experiences.
• Positive titles are shorter; titles introducing
positive reviews are also shorter.
• Positive OTR titles are linked to positively rated
reviews. The correspondence is not given for
negative titles.
IMPLICATIONS
• OTR titles should be included in social media
monitoring/academic research.
• Confirmed previous findings of misalignment
between negative reviews and review ratings.
• Review platforms need to recognize importance of
titles and provide better instructions.
• Could be used for review fast, automatic review
classifications.
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FUTURE RESEARCH
• Should be compared to advertising slogans/
taglines of the destinations.
• Need more research on negative argumentation
• Need to explore further concessive statements
(but, if).
• Widen scope in terms of destinations and
languages.
ENTER 2012 Research Track Slide Number 17
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