Effects of the Hybrid CRITIC–VIKOR Method on Product Aspect Ranking in Customer Reviews

Abstract

Product aspect ranking is critical for prioritizing the most important aspects of a specific product/service to assist probable customers in selecting suitable products that can realize their needs. However, given the voluminous customer reviews published on websites, customers are hindered from manually extracting and characterizing the specific aspects of searched products. A few multicriteria decision-making methods have been implemented to rank the most relevant product aspects. As weights greatly affect the ranking results of product aspects, this study used objective methods in finding the importance degree of a criteria set to overcome the limitations of subjective weighting. The growing popularity of online shopping has led to an exponential increase in the number of customer reviews available on various e-commerce websites. The sheer volume of these reviews makes it nearly impossible for customers to manually extract and analyze the specific aspects of the products they are interested in. This challenge highlights the need for automated techniques that can efficiently rank the product aspects based on their relevance and importance. Multicriteria decision-making techniques can address the issue of product aspect ranking. These techniques seek to offer a methodical strategy for assessing and contrasting various product attributes based on various criteria. The subjective nature of determining weights for each criterion raises serious issues because it might lead to bias and inconsistent ranking outcomes. The CRITIC–VIKOR method was adopted in the product aspect ranking process. The statistical findings based on a benchmark dataset using NDCG demonstrate the superior performance of the method of using objective weighting to reasonably acquire subjective weighting results. Also, the results show that the product aspects ranked by using CRITIC–VIKOR could be considered guidelines for probable customers to make a wise purchasing decision.