A Generic Graph-Based Method for Flexible Aspect-Opinion Analysis of Complex Product Customer Feedback

Abstract

Product design experts depend on online customer reviews as a source of insight to improve product design. Previous works used aspect-based sentiment analysis to extract insight from product reviews. However, their approaches for requirements elicitation are less flexible than traditional tools such as interviews and surveys. They require costly data labeling or pre-labeled datasets, lack domain knowledge integration, and focus more on sentiment classification than flexible aspect-opinion analysis. Related works lack effective mechanisms for probing the customer feedback of complex configurable products. This study proposes a generic graph-based opinion mining and analysis method for product design improvement. First, a customer feedback data preprocessing and annotation pipeline that can incorporate designer-specified domain knowledge is proposed. Second, an intuitive opinion-aware labeled property graph data model is designed to ingest preprocessed feedback data and perform ad hoc opinion analysis. Applying the generic model to a real-world dataset demonstrates superior functionality and flexibility compared to related works. A wider range of analyses is supported in a single model without repeating data preprocessing and modeling. Specifically, the proposed method supports regular and comparative aspect-opinion analysis, aspect satisfaction/influence ranking, opinion trend extraction, and targeted aspect-opinion summarization.