Aspects from appraisals!! A label propagation with prior induction approach

Abstract

Performance appraisal (PA) is an important Human Resources exercise conducted by most organizations. The text data generated during the PA process can be a source of valuable insights for management. As a new application area, analysis of a large PA dataset (100K sentences) of supervisor feedback text is carried out. As the first contribution, the paper redefines the notion of an aspect in the feedback text. Aspects in PA text are like activities characterized by verb-noun pairs. These activities vary dynamically from employee to employee (e.g. conduct training, improve coding) and can be challenging to identify than the static properties of products like a camera (e.g. price, battery life). Another important contribution of the paper is a novel enhancement to the Label Propagation (LP) algorithm to identify aspects from PA text. It involves induction of a prior distribution for each node and iterative identification of new aspects starting from a seed set. Evaluation using a manually labelled set of 500 verb-noun pairs suggests an improvement over multiple baselines.