A feature dependent method for opinion mining and classification

Abstract

Mining the web for customer opinion on different products is both a useful, as well as challenging task. Previous approaches to customer review classification included document level, sentence and clause level sentiment analysis and feature based opinion summarization. In this paper, we present a feature driven opinion summarization method, where the term "driven" is employed to describe the concept-to-detail (product class to product-specific characteristics) approach we took. For each product class we first automatically extract general features (characteristics describing any product, such as price, size, design), for each product we then extract specific features (as picture resolution in the case of a digital camera) and feature attributes (adjectives grading the characteristics, as for example high or low for price, small or big for size and modern or faddy for design). Further on, we assign a polarity (positive or negative) to each of the feature attributes using a previously annotated corpus and Support Vector Machines Sequential Minimal Optimization[1] machine learning with the Normalized Google Distance[2]. We show how the method presented is employed to build a feature-driven opinion summarization system that is presently working in English and Spanish. In order to detect the product category, we use a modified system for person names classification. The raw review text is split into sentences and depending on the product class detected, only the phrases containing the specific product features are selected for further processing. The phrases extracted undergo a process of anaphora resolution, Named Entity Recognition and syntactic parsing. Applying syntactic dependency and part of speech patterns, we extract pairs containing the feature and the polarity of the feature attribute the customer associates to the feature in the review. Eventually, we statistically summarize the polarity of the opinions different customers expressed about the product on the web as percentages of positive and negative opinions about each of the product features. We show the results and improvements over baseline, together with a discussion on the strong and weak points of the method and the directions for future work. ©2008 IEEE.