A 2-tuple fuzzy linguistic model for recommending health care services grounded on aspect-based sentiment analysis

Abstract

Evaluating the quality of health care systems usually entails the examination of objective variables (waiting time, patients per doctor, etc.). Nonetheless, other subjective variables can be used thanks to new Internet tools. Many online medical services let users convey their opinions on the offered services. That information is an interesting tool to measure the quality of these services. It describes sentiments about different features using a wide range of adjectives, adverbs and nouns, many times, completely different for each feature. Therefore, it is interesting to assess every feature individually using different scales. This study presents an application of a multi-granular fuzzy linguistic model to represent the opinions about the different features of health care systems with the aim of recommending hospitals according to the user preferences. To test this approach, the opinions from real hospitals have been assessed using different user preferences. The obtained results outperform other state-of-the-art approaches.