Comparing sentiment expression in movie reviews from four online genres

Purpose – This paper aims to investigate the characteristics and differences in sentiment expression in movie review documents from four online opinion genres – blog postings, discussion board threads, user reviews, and critic reviews. Design/methodology/approach – A collection of movie review documents was harvested from the four types of web sources, and a sample of 520 movie reviews were analysed to compare the content and textual characteristics across the four genres. The analysis focused on document and sentence length, part‐of‐speech distribution, vocabulary, aspects of movies discussed, star ratings used and multimedia content in the reviews. The study also identified frequently occurring positive and negative terms in the different genres, as well as the pattern of responses in discussion threads. Findings – Critic reviews and blog postings are longer than user reviews and discussion threads, and contain longer sentences. Critic reviews and blogs contain more nouns and prepositions, whereas discussion board and user reviews have more verbs and adverbs. Critic reviews have the largest vocabulary and also the highest proportion of unique terms not found in the other genres. The most informative sentiment words in each genre are provided in the paper. With regard to content, critic reviews are more comprehensive in coverage, and discuss the movie director much more often than the other genres. User reviews discuss the scene aspects (including action and visual effects) more often than the other genres, while blogs tend to talk about the cast, and discuss the music and sound slightly more often. Research limitations/implications – The study only analysed movie review documents. Similar content and text analysis studies can be carried out in other domains, such as commercial product reviews, celebrity reviews, company reviews and political opinions to compare the results. Originality/value – The main contribution of the study is the sentiment content analysis results across genres, which show the similarities and differences in content and textual characteristics in the four online opinion genres. The insights will be useful in designing automatic sentiment summarisation methods for multiple online genres.