User Reviews and Language

Abstract

The number of user reviews of tourist attractions, restaurants, mobile apps, etc. is increasing for all languages; yet, research is lacking on how reviews in multiple languages should be aggregated and displayed. Speakers of different languages may have consistently different experiences, e.g., different information available in different languages at tourist attractions or different user experiences with software due to internationalization/localization choices. This paper assesses the similarity in the ratings given by speakers of different languages to London tourist attractions on TripAdvisor. The correlations between different languages are generally high, but some language pairs are more correlated than others. The results question the common practice of computing average ratings from reviews in many languages.

Hotel online reviews: different languages, different opinions

“…The results obtained from the analysis of the reviews' quantitative and textual components clearly reveal different behaviors toward online reviews depending on language. These results are in line with the findings of Schuckert et al (2015a), Hale (2016), Pacheco (2016), and Liu et al 2017but extend their results by demonstrating there are differences in the quantitative and qualitative (textual) components.…”

“…For this reason, and because of the difficulty of processing text in a multitude of languages (Han et al 2016), online reviews in these three languages were selected as the object of this study. By using quantitative and qualitative data from two data sources, two types of hotels, and two distinct regions, this study answers previous studies' call for new research on online reviews with a fusion of data from different sources (Hale 2016;Han et al 2016;Pacheco 2016), different cities (Hale 2016;Han et al 2016;Pacheco 2016;Schuckert et al 2015a), different hotel types (Kim et al 2015), and different languages (Cantallops and Salvi 2014;Schuckert et al 2015a). In summary, this study seeks to answer two main questions: Q1) What is the relationship between the language in which online reviews are written and the ratings for the same hotel type/category?…”

“…They concluded that English-speaking guests give higher ratings to hotels than non-English-speaking guests because of their cultural background and that hotel ratings with more non-English guests were negatively affected. Although Hale's (2016) work did not focus on hospitality, it studied how travelers rate London attractions in online reviews according to their language. The author examined more than 516,000 ratings from reviews published on TripAdvisor and revealed that ratings in English reviews were on average slightly (with very low statistical significance) lower than those in non-English reviews.…”

“…Previous studies have noted the lack of research that examines hotel online reviews by language, hotel type, city/region, and publication source (Cantallops and Salvi 2014;Hale 2016;Han et al 2016;Kim et al 2015;Schuckert et al 2015a). Studies have also described that is very difficult to access hotel occupancy/sales data, and thus, authors often must rely on proxy measures to extrapolate the total number of guests who post reviews.…”

“…Schuckert et al (2015a) studied the rating behavior of English-speaking and non-English-speaking guests in Hong Kong hotels and, among other findings, discovered that the former awarded higher ratings than the latter. Hale (2016) studied the similarities in the ratings of London tourist attractions given by speakers of different languages, and the author ended up questioning the (common) practice of averaging the ratings of the reviews in different languages. There is a need for research that conducts an analysis across a large number of nationalities (Ayeh et al 2016) and diverse international destinations (Schuckert et al 2015a).…”