Abstract

The website Rotten Tomatoes, located at www.rottentomatoes.com, is primarily an online repository of movie reviews. For each movie review document, the site provides a link to the full review, along with a brief description of its sentiment. The description consists of a rating (“fresh” or “rotten”) and a short quotation from the review. Other research (Pang, Lee, & Vaithyanathan 2002) has predicted a movie review’s rating from its text. In this paper, we focus on the quotation, which is a main attraction to site users. A Rotten Tomatoes quotation is typically about one sentence in length and expresses concisely the reviewer’s opinion of the movie. To illustrate, Curtis Edmonds’s review of the documentary Spellbound is encapsulated, “Hitchcock couldn’t have asked for a more suspenseful situation.” A.O. Scott’s review of Once upon a Time in Mexico is encapsulated, “A noisy, unholy mess, with moments of wit and surprise that ultimately make its brutal tedium all the more disappointing.” A reader can infer from these statements whether or not the overall sentiment is favorable, and get an impression about why. Consequently, we refer to them as sentiment summaries.