Identifying appraisal expressions of online reviews in Chinese

Abstract

With the development of Web2. 0 technology, an increasing number of consumers are giving comments on products over the Internet, thus opinion mining rises in response to the requirement of retrieving valuable information in speed. After thoroughly analyzing the style of language and the ways of expression in Chinese, this paper proposes a semantic lexicon-based method to identify the appraisal expressions in Chinese online reviews. A comparative experiment based on cellphone online reviews in Chinese is conducted in this research, and the result indicates that the proposed method is quite promising and outperforms the two baselines (a statistic orientation method and a semantic orientation method). Moreover, the method is applied to a comparative evaluation of two popular cellphones, demonstrating the theoretical significance and the practical value of this research.