OpinionLink: Leveraging user opinions for product catalog enrichment

Abstract A vast number of user opinions are available from reviews posted on e-commerce websites. Although these opinions are a valuable source of knowledge for both manufacturers and customers, they provide volumes of information that exceeds the human cognitive processing capacity, which can be a major bottleneck for their effective use. To address this problem, a number of opinion-summarization methods have been proposed to organize these opinions by grouping them around aspects . However, these methods tend to generate an excessive number of aspect groups that are frequently overly generic and difficult to interpret. We argue that a superior alternative would be to organize opinions around product attributes as defined in a product catalog. Typically, product attributes correspond to the most important characteristics of the products. Furthermore, they are common to all products in a given category and thus, form a more stable set than aspects. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called OpinionLink to products in a catalog at the attribute granularity level with opinions extracted from product reviews. The proposed approach is divided into two phases. In the first phase, OpinionLink uses a classifier to identify opinionated sentences in the reviews on a particular product. In the second phase, another classifier is used to map the opinions that were previously extracted from the user reviews to the attributes of the products in the product catalog. We performed a series of experiments on these phases. For the first phase, our experiments indicated that using classifiers with the proposed features achieved an average of 0.87 in terms of F 1 measure for the task of identifying opinionated sentences. In the second phase, the method we proposed for the opinion-mapping task achieved an average of 0.85 in terms of F 1 . Further, we verified the effectiveness of the proposed approach as a realistic end-to-end application, indicating that we can use OpinionLink in a real setting. Finally, we empirically demonstrate the feasibility of using the proposed approach with an extremely large volume of opinions available in a collection of more than 600,000 real reviews. We also set forth a number of directions for future research.