A valuable small subset strategically selected from massive online reviews is beneficial to improve consumers’ decision-making efficiency in e-commerce. Existing review selection methods primarily concentrate on the informativeness of reviews and aim to find a subset of reviews that can reflect the informational properties of the original review set. However, changes in consumers’ review diets during the two-phase decision process are not fully considered. In this study, we propose a novel review selection problem of finding a diet-matched review subset with high diversity and representativeness, which can better adapt to consumers’ review-diet conversion from attribute-oriented to experience-oriented reviews between two decision phases. A novel decision-phase-based review selection method named DPRS is further proposed, which involves two steps: review classification and review selection. In the review classification step, the probability of a review being attribute-oriented or experience-oriented is estimated by prior knowledge-aware attentive neural network. In the second step, a novel heuristic algorithm, namely, stepwise non-dominated selection with superiority strategy, is introduced to seek the solution to the review selection problem. Extensive experiments on a real-world dataset demonstrate that DPRS outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both review classification and review selection.

Competitiveness degree analysis is a focal point of business strategy and competitive intelligence, aimed to help managers closely monitor to what extent their rivals are competing with them. This article proposes a novel method, namely BCQ, to measure the competitiveness degree between peers from query logs as an important form of user generated contents, which reflects the “wisdom of crowds” from the search engine users’ perspective. In doing so, a bipartite graph model is developed to capture the competitive relationships through conjoint attributes hidden in query logs, where the notion of competitiveness degree for entity pairs is introduced, and then used to identify the competitive paths mapped in the bipartite graph. Subsequently, extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of BCQ to quantify the competitiveness degrees. Experimental results reveal that BCQ can well support competitors ranking, which is helpful for devising competitive strategies and pursuing market performance. In addition, efficiency experiments on synthetic data show a good scalability of BCQ on large scale of query logs.