Classification of Helpful and Unhelpful Online Customer Reviews Using XLNet and BERT Variants

The majority of businesses have made public appearances on various social media platforms as a result of recent advances in e-commerce and the popularity of social media websites. Customers can share their experiences in the form of online customer reviews, which can assist potential customers in determining the quality of a company and making purchasing decisions. Due to the large volume of published reviews, it becomes difficult for customers to read all of the reviews and assess the quality of the business, resulting in the problem of information overload. Several solutions have been proposed in the literature by researchers using statistical and machine learning techniques to predict the helpfulness of online customer reviews. However, most of the existing solutions are based on the use of various business, review, and reviewer features, which lead to generalizability issues. Moreover, very limited studies have examined the effectiveness of state-of-the-art pre-trained language models for the classification of helpful and unhelpful reviews. Therefore, this study aims to examine the effectiveness of XLNet, Albert, DistilBert, and Roberta for review helpfulness prediction using textual features. The models were fine-tuned using a publicly available dataset of Yelp reviews. The results showed that XLNet achieved the highest F1-score of 0.730 compared to a benchmark of 0.717 achieved by the BERT base model.