From amateurs to connoisseurs modeling t

From amateurs to connoisseurs: modeling the evolution of user expertise through online reviews. McAuley, J. J., & Leskovec, J. (2013, May). From amateurs to connoisseurs: modeling the evolution of user expertise through online reviews. In Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web (pp. 897-908). ACM.

We model such ‘personal development’ through the lens of user experience, or expertise.

The underlying hypothesis that we aim to model is that users with similar levels of experience will rate products in similar ways, even if their ratings are temporally far apart. In other words, each user evolves on their own ‘personal clock’; this differs from other models of temporal dynamics, which model the evolution of user and product parameters on a single timescale [20, 40, 41].

I would be interested in drawing this into the role of experts in the cascade model above; more expertise means more influence on driving further change. 

In particular, our goal is not to say whether experienced/expert users are ‘better’ or ‘more accurate’ at rating products. We simply model the fact that users with the same level of experience/expertise rate products in a similar way

Experienced users’ behavior can be most accurately predicted by the model. In other words their rating behavior can be most accurately predicted by our model.

SUMMARY model is good at predicting users’ reviews of products. 

Changing user expertise is then used as a feature to describe patterns in user development. The authors showed that people who go on to become experts tend to progress more rapidly through the stages, that experts tend to agree with one another, 

CRITIQUE How do we distinguish between a different interpretation? Liking hops has come to be recognized as a  mark of expertise, which has a positive feedback loop: people who profess an appreciation of hops become more and more influential in the community.

BRAINSTORM Quite relevant to communities of practice. 

[12] H. Einhorn. Expert judgment: Some necessary conditions and an example. Journal of Applied Psychology, 1974.

S. Romaine. The language of children and adolescents: The acquisition of communicative competence. Wiley, 1984.