Accurate Retrieval of Corporate Reputation from Online Media Using Machine Learning

Abstract

Corporate reputation is an economic asset and its accurate measurement is of increasing interest in practice and science. This measurement task is difficult because reputation depends on numerous factors and stakeholders. Traditional measurement approaches have focused on human ratings and surveys, which are costly, can be conducted only infrequently and emphasize financial aspects of a corporation. Nowadays, online media with comments related to products, services, and corporations provides an abundant source for measuring reputation more comprehensively. Against this backdrop, we propose an information retrieval approach to automatically collect reputation-related text content from online media and analyze this content by machine learning-based sentiment analysis. We contribute an ontology for identifying corporations and a unique dataset of online media texts labelled by corporations’ reputation. Our approach achieves an overall accuracy of 84.4%. Our results help corporations to quickly identify their reputation from online media at low cost.