A Reinforced Semi-supervised Neural Network for Helpful Review Identification

It is crucial to recommend helpful product reviews to consumers in e-commercial service, as the helpful ones can promote consumption. Existing methods for identifying helpful reviews are based on the supervised learning paradigm. The capacity of supervised methods, however, is limited by the lack of annotated reviews. In addition, there is a serious distributional bias between the labeled and unlabeled reviews. Therefore, this paper proposes a reinforced semi-supervised neural learning method (abbreviated as RSSNL) for helpful review identification, which can automatically select high-related unlabeled reviews to help training. Concretely, RSSNL composes with a reinforced unlabeled review selection policy and a semi-supervised pseudo-labeling review classifier. These two parts train jointly and integrate together based on the policy gradient framework. Extensive experiments on Amazon product reviews verify the effectiveness of RSSNL for using unlabeled reviews.