Fined-grained Aspect Extraction from Online Reviews for Decision Support

With the flourish of the Web 2.0, online reviews offer valuable information for customers and businesses. Deep investigation on the online reviews can help the businesses understand customers and their needs, which can assist decision making in product design and marketing. However, the massive records with irregular structure and ambiguous words pose great challenges for online review analysis. In this paper, we focus on the movie reviews and propose a framework to mine the aspect-based opinions, and utilize the results for decision making support. Based on the different sentence characteristics of movie reviews collected from Douban, the most popular movie community in China, we divide the reviews into two categories, short reviews and long reviews. Firstly, we develop different methods to extract the fine-grained aspects including the global and local aspects from the short reviews and long reviews respectively. Secondly, a lexical updating algorithm is proposed to identify the opinion words towards different aspects. In contrast to most studies that focus on determining the overall sentiment orientation (positive versus negative), the proposed method performs fine-grained analysis to mine both the various aspects and their corresponding opinions of a movie. Finally, based on the positive and negative opinions towards different aspects, the producers can improve the marketing strategy and future products. Experimental results based on the data collected from Douban verify the efficiency and accuracy of the developed methods.