Automatically Predicting Peer-Review Helpfulness

Identifying peer-review helpfulness is an important task for improving the quality of feedback that students receive from their peers. As a first step towards enhancing existing peerreview systems with new functionality based on helpfulness detection, we examine whether standard product review analysis techniques also apply to our new context of peer reviews. In addition, we investigate the utility of incorporating additional specialized features tailored to peer review. Our preliminary results show that the structural features, review unigrams and meta-data combined are useful in modeling the helpfulness of both peer reviews and product reviews, while peer-review specific auxiliary features can further improve helpfulness prediction.