Review Spotlight Extension

Welcome to the Review Spotlight Extension page. Review Spotlight provides you with a visualization summarizing reviews available from Yelp or Amazon using adjective-noun word pairs.
Overview
Review Spotlight is a visualization summarizing online user reviews. Currently Review Spotlight is developed as a Google Chrome extension and supports Yelp and Amazon. When you access a Yelp or Amazon webpage, you can display the Review Spotlight visualization for that specific reviewed location by clicking the green circle () shown on the address bar.
Word Pair Visualization

Review Spotlight visualizes a summary of the user reviews posted on any given Yelp or Amazon webpage using adjective-noun word pairs. When you hover the cursor over a word pair, you can see other adjectives that are also paired with the noun (in the following example, "good," "delicious," "roast," and "thin" in addition to "stewed" have been used frequently to describe "pork").

When you click a word pair, you can see the original sentences in which the selected word pair is used in the textbox below. The textbox also shows how many times that word pair is mentioned in the reviews.
Time Histogram

Review Spotlight also visualizes how many reviews have been posted over time. The time histogram shows the number of reviews posted per month. By default, Review Spotlight uses all the reviews available for the reviewed location you are viewing.

You can specify the time period for which Review Spotlight should visualize the reviews. Simply drag one end of the slider attached to the bottom of the time histogram. In this way, you can look at how the reviews have changed over time.


       
Positive, Negative & Objective Word Pairs

Review Spotlight uses a different color to indicate how positive, negative, or objective each word pair is. The stronger the words are green, red, and blue means a stronger level of positivity, negativity, objectivity, respectively. You can also filter each kind of words by checking off the corresponding checkbox. The following figure shows the Review Spotlight visualization with only positive word pairs shown.
Installation Guide
  1. Before installing Review Spotlight, you need to install Google Chrome.
  2. Next, download the Review Spotlight extension from here.
  3. Finally, if you use a Windows computer, please follow these installation steps specific to the Windows platform.
    Or If you use a Macintosh computer, please follow these installation steps specific to the Macintosh platform.
Study Information

Our extension will pop up a small questionnaire every 50 times you visit websites for which Review Spotlight is available. This small questionnaire contains questions about why you use or do not use Review Spotlight. When you fill out the questionnaire, you will get one entry in a drawing in which five participants will be chosen randomly and offered a $50 Amazon gift card. Additionally, some users will be invited to a follow-up interview about how you use our system and what aspect of our system you like and dislike. We will offer a separate compensation (a $30 Amazon gift card) for this follow-up interview.

Note that you can use the extension without taking part in this study. Your participation in this study is voluntary. For more detail, please see http://spotlight.atrustyweb.cs.toronto.edu/signup.
Contact Information
If you have any question about this study or our extension, please send us an email at revspot [at] dgp.toronto.edu.