Multi-domain gated CNn for review helpfulness prediction

Consumers today face too many reviews to read when shopping online. Presenting the most helpful reviews, instead of all, to them will greatly ease purchase decision making. Most of the existing studies on review helpfulness prediction focused on domains with rich labels, not suitable for domains with insufficient labels. In response, we explore a multi-domain approach that learns domain relationships to help the task by transferring knowledge from data-rich domains to data-deficient domains. To better model domain differences, our approach gates multi-granularity embeddings in a Neural Network (NN) based transfer learning framework to reflect the domain-variant importance of words. Extensive experiments empirically demonstrate that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines and NN-based methods without gating on this task. Our approach facilitates more effective knowledge transfer between domains, especially when the target domain dataset is small. Meanwhile, the domain relationship and domain-specific embedding gating are insightful and interpretable.