What are the emotions felt while experiencing experience goods such as a film, a song, or a restaurant? We found that these emotions can be extracted from the reviews written for these items.
Emotional signatures
Online reviews are broadly believed to reflect consumers' opinions towards the reviewed items. In this line of research, we show that online reviews for experience goods also reflect something very different, the reviewer's emotions while experiencing the item. Specifically for films, which are made with the intent of evoking an emotional response, we demonstrate that the emotions that the viewer experienced while watching the movie are reflected in their online review, and can be reliably extracted from it, using our emotional signatures.
Paper: Osnat Mokryn, David Boddof, Nadim Bader, Yael Albo, Joel Lanir. Sharing emotions: Determining films’ evoked emotional experience from their online reviews. Information Retrieval Journal, Special Issue on Mining Actionable Insights from Online User Generated Content. V. 1, pp. 1-27, April 2020. (PDF)
Emotional signatures of sequels are significantly closer than emotional signatures of any two films or even same-genre films. Here we can see the emotional signatures of several Harry Potter sequels.
A 25-mins talk on our results: