Discovery of subjective evaluations of product features in hotel reviews

Abstract

Automated discovery and analysis of customer opinions on the web holds a lot of promise for present-day practices of market research and customer relationship management. Opinion mining attempts to come up with ways to automatically analyse subjectivity expressed in natural language text. Previous research on the topic has shown that the overall subjectivity expressed in a document, such as a customer review, can be assessed with accuracy that is feasible in real-world applications. In this paper, we address the challenge of identification of customer opinions expressed towards specific features of a product, such as service quality and location of a hotel. The paper proposes and investigates a method to recognize the relationships between subjective expressions and references to features of a product. While the method has been evaluated on customer hotel reviews, it can potentially find application also in many tasks where concrete statements need to be extracted from documents on heterogeneous topics such as posts in forums, comments on blogs, or utterances in a chat room.