Understanding Quality of Products from Customers’ Attitude Using Advanced Machine Learning Methods

Abstract

The trend of E-commerce and online shopping is increasing rapidly. However, it is difficult to know about the quality of items from pictures and videos available on the online stores. Therefore, online stores and independent products reviews sites share user reviews about the products for the ease of buyers to find out the best quality products. The proposed work is about measuring and detecting product quality based on consumers’ attitude in product reviews. Predicting the quality of a product from customers’ reviews is a challenging and novel research area. Natural Language Processing and machine learning methods are popularly employed to identify product quality from customer reviews. Most of the existing research for the product review system has been done using traditional sentiment analysis and opinion mining. Going beyond the constraints of opinion and sentiment, such as a deeper description of the input text, is made possible by utilizing appraisal categories. The main focus of this study is exploiting the quality subcategory of the appraisal framework in order to predict the quality of the product. This paper presents a quality of product-based classification model (named QLeBERT) by combining quality of product-related lexicon, N-grams, Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), and Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory (BiLSTM). In the proposed model, the quality of the product-related lexicon, N-grams, and BERT are employed to generate vectors of words from part of the customers’ reviews. The main contribution of this work is the preparation of the quality of product-related lexicon dictionary based on an appraisal framework and automatically labelling the data accordingly before using them as the training data in the BiLSTM model. The proposed model is evaluated on an Amazon product reviews dataset. The proposed QLeBERT outperforms the existing state-of-the-art models by achieving an F1macro score of 0.91 in binary classification.