Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis on Car Reviews Using SpaCy Dependency Parsing and VADER

All businesses, including car manufacturers, need to understand what aspects of their products are perceived as positive and negative based on user reviews so that they can make improvements for the negative aspects and maintain the already positive aspects of their products. One of the available tools for this task is Sentiment Analysis. The traditional document-level and sentence-level sentiment analysis will only classify each document / sentence into a class. This approach is incapable of finding the more fine-grained sentiment for a specific aspect of interest, for example, comfort, price, engine, paint, etc. Therefore, in this case, Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis is used. A total of 22.702 rows of car review data are scraped from the Edmunds website (www.edmunds.com) for a specific car manufacturer. Dependency Parsing and noun phrase extraction were carried out using the SpaCy module in Python, and VADER sentiment analysis was used to determine the polarity of the sentiment for each noun phrase. Results showed that the vast majority of the sentiments are on the positive aspects: comfortable to drive, good fuel economy / mileage, reliability, spaciousness, value for money, helpful rear camera, quiet ride, good acceleration, well-designed, good sound system, and solid build. The results for the negative aspects have some similar aspects with those in the positive class but has a very low frequency. This finding means that the vast majority of the users are satisfied with multiple aspects of the produced cars. The limitation of this research and future research direction are discussed.