Beyond Exchangeability: The Chinese Voting Process

TL;DR

The paper introduces the Chinese Voting Process, a model capturing how helpfulness votes in online communities evolve influenced by social reinforcement, position, and presentation biases, with evaluation on Amazon reviews and StackExchange data.

Contribution

It presents a novel probabilistic model for voting dynamics that accounts for social influence and biases, advancing understanding of online response evaluation.

Findings

Model accurately captures voting behavior dynamics

Reveals community-specific behavioral coefficients

Improves assessment of response quality

Abstract

Many online communities present user-contributed responses such as reviews of products and answers to questions. User-provided helpfulness votes can highlight the most useful responses, but voting is a social process that can gain momentum based on the popularity of responses and the polarity of existing votes. We propose the Chinese Voting Process (CVP) which models the evolution of helpfulness votes as a self-reinforcing process dependent on position and presentation biases. We evaluate this model on Amazon product reviews and more than 80 StackExchange forums, measuring the intrinsic quality of individual responses and behavioral coefficients of different communities.