UGSD: User generated sentiment dictionaries from online customer reviews

Abstract

Customer reviews on platforms such as TripAdvisor and Amazon provide rich information about the ways that people convey sentiment on certain domains. Given these kinds of user reviews, this paper proposes UGSD, a representation learning framework for constructing domain-specific sentiment dictionaries from online customer reviews, in which we leverage the relationship between user-generated reviews and the ratings of the reviews to associate the reviewer sentiment with certain entities. The proposed framework has the following three main advantages. First, no additional annotations of words or external dictionaries are needed for the proposed framework; the only resources needed are the review texts and entity ratings. Second, the framework is applicable across a variety of user-generated content from different domains to construct domain-specific sentiment dictionaries. Finally, each word in the constructed dictionary is associated with a low-dimensional dense representation and a degree of relatedness to a certain rating, which enable us to obtain more fine-grained dictionaries and enhance the application scalability of the constructed dictionaries as the word representations can be adopted for various tasks or applications, such as entity ranking and dictionary expansion. The experimental results on three real-world datasets show that the framework is effective in constructing high-quality domain-specific sentiment dictionaries from customer reviews.