Feature expansion using lexical ontology for opinion type detection in tourism reviews domain

Abstract

Tourism reviews platform such as Trip Advisor become a major source for tourists to share their experiences and get some ideas for decision making. Since there are millions of reviews generated daily in the travel websites, tourist is often overwhelmed with huge information. This is where opinion type detection is important as it makes it easy for a tourist to obtain useful reviews for their understanding and planning processes based on the reviews' opinion type. The opinion type of texts in travel mostly involves different aspects of opinion related to the travel process, such as transportation, accommodation, price, food, entertainment, and so on. The challenge of this research is to improve this detection by proposing the lexical ontology approach to address the issue of out-of-vocabulary (OOV) keywords during a supervised detection of opinion type. Besides, there are also issues where the training data for detection has poor coverage or limited in a certain domain. In this paper, we propose a review opinion type detection approach by integrating the word (feature) expansion approach in machine learning. The suggested approach consists of two stages namely feature expansion and classification. For feature expansion, Lexical Ontology (LO) is used to expand the feature-related word to the domains such as synonyms. For classification, the expanded feature is corporate to the Machine Learning approach to detect the opinion type.