Foreign-language Reviews: Help or Hindrance? (Slides)

Foreign-language Reviews: Help or Hindrance?
Scott A. Hale1 Irene Eleta2
1Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford
@computermacgyve
http://scott.hale.us/
2
Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal)
http://www.ieleta.com/
@ieleta
10 May 2017
Scott A. Hale & Irene Eleta Foreign-language Reviews: Help or Hindrance?

Localness
Localness
One oft-cited beneﬁt of user-generated content (and volunteered geographic
information) is localness.
Engages local content producers
“Mapping where it should be, which is the hands of local people who
know an area well” (Geographer M. Goodchild in New York Times, 17 Nov. 2009)
Novel research opportunities and applications

Localness
Localness
One oft-cited beneﬁt of user-generated content (and volunteered geographic
information) is localness.
Engages local content producers
“Mapping where it should be, which is the hands of local people who
know an area well” (Geographer M. Goodchild in New York Times, 17 Nov. 2009)
Novel research opportunities and applications
Language is a large barrier
“Information in languages not native to a place tends to be produced and
sourced by non-locals.” (Sen et al., 2015)
Large diﬀerences in information between languages (Hecht & Gergle,
2010)
Low/moderate levels of multilingualism online (Hale, 2014a, 2014b)

Diversity of designs: Google Play

Diversity of designs: TripAdvisor

Question
Multilingual design (e.g., showing reviews from multiple languages) may
encourage the spread of information between languages (most
expectedly by multilingual users), but
could multilingual design also confuse some users (most expectedly
monolingual users)?

Online reviews
Online reviews affect product sales (Korfiatis, Garc´ıa-Bariocanal, &
Sánchez-Alonso, 2012), but many factors involved, including:
the quality of reviews
trust associated with reviewers
quantity of (bad) reviews
temporal effects (Hu, Liu, & Zhang, 2008)
Quantity of reviews desired varies from platform to platform, but 6 reviews
has been suggested as generally sufficient (Park, Lee, & Han, 2007).

Approach

Approach
Three cycle tours in London
(randomly match photos, titles, and descriptions for each participant)

Approach
Three cycle tours in London
(randomly match photos, titles, and descriptions for each participant)
15 randomly selected 4 or 5 star reviews written on a large travel
website
Reviews edited to be generic; all reviews translated to Spanish

Multilingual interface design
Each tour was randomly assigned one of three conditions:
(en3) Three
English reviews
(en3es3) Three
English and three
Spanish reviews
No translation
button
With
translation
button
Pretranslated
(en6) Six English
reviews

(en3) Three English
reviews
(en3es3) Three
English and three
Spanish reviews
No translation
button
With
translation
button
Pretranslated
(en6) Six English
reviews

(en3) Three English
reviews
(en3es3) Three
English and three
Spanish reviews
No
translation
button
With
translation
button
Pretranslated
(en6) Six English
reviews

Measurements

Results
(Study I: 480 participants from Mechanical Turk)

en6
N=416
en3es3
N=416
en3
N=416
Condition
b. Individual likelihood of booking

Condition
en3es3: No translation
(N=198)
en3es3: Translation
(N=218)
b. Individual likelihood of booking

Study II: Individual differences
What individual differences predict finding foreign-language reviews helpful?
? Big Five personality dimensions
? Openness
? Foreign experience
265 participants from Prolific.ac

Replicate key ﬁndings from Study I.
(Those who click to view translations are more likely to prefer the bilingual
tour.)

tour.)
X Big Five personality dimensions
X Openness
X Foreign experience

tour.)
X Big Five personality dimensions
X Openness
X Foreign experience
O Mean importance given to reviews in all three conditions was
signiﬁcantly higher amongst subjects clicking to see translations.

Summary and next steps
Summary
No overall effect of foreign-language reviews
Very different behavior from people who (don’t) click to see translations
Personality/openness do not predict behavior;
people who highly value reviews?
Next steps
Beyond tours
Non-English speaking locations
Subjects with different language abilities

Applications

Applications: Platform design
Personalization.
Show reviews in multiple languages for people who engage with reviews
(e.g., click to see translations); hide foreign-language reviews for those who
do not.

Applications: Multiple Twitter accounts or one?

Hale, S. A. (2014a). Global Connectivity and Multilinguals in the Twitter
Network. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors
in Computing Systems (pp. 833–842). New York: ACM. Retrieved
from http://www.scotthale.net/pubs/?chi2014 doi:
10.1145/2556288.2557203
Hale, S. A. (2014b). Multilinguals and Wikipedia editing. In Proceedings of
the 6th annual acm web science conference. New York: ACM.
Retrieved from http://www.scotthale.net/pubs/?websci2014
Hecht, B., & Gergle, D. (2010). The Tower of Babel meets Web 2.0:
User-generated content and its applications in a multilingual context.
In Proceedings of the 28th international conference on human factors
in computing systems (pp. 291–300). New York, NY, USA: ACM.
Retrieved from http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753326.1753370
doi: 10.1145/1753326.1753370

Hu, N., Liu, L., & Zhang, J. J. (2008). Do online reviews affect product
sales? the role of reviewer characteristics and temporal effects.
Information Technology and Management, 9(3), 201–214. Retrieved
from http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10799-008-0041-2 doi:
10.1007/s10799-008-0041-2
Korfiatis, N., Garc´ıa-Bariocanal, E., & Sánchez-Alonso, S. (2012).
Evaluating content quality and helpfulness of online product reviews:
The interplay of review helpfulness vs. review content. Electronic
Commerce Research and Applications, 11(3), 205–217. Retrieved from
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/
S1567422311000639 doi: 10.1016/j.elerap.2011.10.003
Park, D.-H., Lee, J., & Han, I. (2007). The effect of on-line consumer
reviews on consumer purchasing intention: The moderating role of
involvement. International Journal of Electronic Commerce, 11(4),
125–148. doi: 10.2753/JEC1086-4415110405

Sen, S., Giesel, M. E., Gold, R., Hillmann, B., Lesicko, M., Naden, S., . . .
Hecht, B. (2015). Turkers, scholars, ”arafat” and ”peace”: Cultural
communities and algorithmic gold standards. In Proceedings of the
18th acm conference on computer supported cooperative work &
social computing (pp. 826–838). New York, NY, USA: ACM.
Retrieved from http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2675133.2675285
doi: 10.1145/2675133.2675285

Foreign-language Reviews: Help or Hindrance? (Slides)

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