AN AUTOMATED METHOD TO CONDUCT IMPORTANCE-PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF PRODUCT ATTRIBUTES FROM ONLINE REVIEWS - AN EXTENSION WITH A CASE STUDY

Abstract

AbstractWith the growth of online marketplaces and social media, product designers have been seeing an exponential growth of data available, which can serve as an extremely valuable source of information communicated from customers without geographical limitations. The data will reveal customers’ preferences, which can be expensive and slow to obtain via traditional methods such as survey and questionnaires. While existing methods in the literature have been proposed to extract product information and make inference from online data, they have limitations, especially in providing reliable results and in dealing with data sparsity. Therefore, this paper proposes a method to conduct an Important-performance analysis from online reviews. The major steps of this method involve using latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) to identify product attributes, using IBM Watson Natural Language Understanding tool to perform aspect-based sentiment analysis, and using XGBoost model to infer product attribute importance from the collected dataset. In our case study, we have collected over 150,000 text reviews of more than 3,000 laptops from Amazon.