Ebay, Incorporated

Catherine Baudin

Shen Huang

Yongzheng Zhang

Dan Shen

Neelakantan Sundaresan

Shuhui Chen

Methods, apparatus, and systems to determine a niche market of items or services, the first phase of which identifies a gap between demand and supply for a set of items. Session logs may be evaluated to compare transactions involving a specific item to those of a larger group of items. The resultant information identifies areas of high demand, but with low availability. The niche market information may be provided as direct merchandising items for sellers. In one example, the method generates niche market item web pages in specific categories. Additional methods, apparatus, and systems are disclosed.

System and method for topic extraction and opinion mining

Techniques for topic extraction and opinion mining are described. For example, a machine accesses a document from a document record of a database. The machine builds a syntax tree of a sentence of the document based on parsing the sentence. The machine assigns a polarity impact to one or more words of the sentence. The machine determines that a plurality of words in the sentence have conflicting polarity based on the syntax tree and the polarity impact of the plurality of words. The machine determines a classification of the sentence based on the determining that the plurality of words in the sentence have conflicting polarity. The machine generates a classification record of the classification in the database.

One embodiment provides a system for recommending products. The system may include a search engine to retrieve, from a collection of product reviews, product review results using at least two input product names. The system may also include a template builder to build comparative sentence templates to define relationships between at least two product names, in which each comparative sentence template has a weight as a function of the defined relationship, and the search engine extracts one or more snippets matching at least one of the comparative sentence templates within each product review result. The system may further include a review ranking device to rank the product review search results based on the one or more extracted snippets, in which each snippet has a same weight as its matched comparative sentence template.

Detecting competitive product reviews

Techniques for topic extraction and opinion mining are described. For example, a machine selects a document that is pertinent to a topic based on searching a plurality of documents. The machine identifies an identifier of a party to a transaction being referenced in the document, and identifies the transaction conducted by the party to the transaction based on the document. The machine determines a rating of the transaction based on the document. The determining of the rating of the transaction includes identifying, from a plurality of polarity words included in the document, a dominant polarity word based on a syntactic distance between the dominant polarity word and the topic in a syntactic tree. The machine determines a sentiment of the document based on the transaction, and the rating of the transaction.

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Palo Alto, CA, United States of America

Catherine Baudin