Aspect-based opinion mining from product reviews

Abstract

What other people think has always been an important piece of information for most of us during the decision-making process. Today people tend to make their opinions available to other people via the Internet. As a result, the Web has become an excellent source of consumer opinions. There are now numerous Web resources containing such opinions, e.g., product reviews forums, discussion groups, and blogs. But, it is really difficult for a customer to read all of the reviews and make an informed decision on whether to purchase the product. It is also difficult for the manufacturer of the product to keep track and manage customer opinions. Also, focusing on just user ratings (stars) is not a sufficient source of information for a user or the manufacturer to make decisions. Therefore, mining online reviews (opinion mining) has emerged as an interesting new research direction. Extracting aspects and the corresponding ratings is an important challenge in opinion mining. An aspect is an attribute or component of a product, e.g. 'zoom' for a digital camera. A rating is an intended interpretation of the user satisfaction in terms of numerical values. Reviewers usually express the rating of an aspect by a set of sentiments, e.g. 'great zoom'. In this tutorial we cover opinion mining in online product reviews with the focus on aspect-based opinion mining. This problem is a key task in the area of opinion mining and has attracted a lot of researchers in the information retrieval community recently. Several opinion related information retrieval tasks can benefit from the results of aspect-based opinion mining and therefore it is considered as a fundamental problem. This tutorial covers not only general opinion mining and retrieval tasks, but also state-of-the-art methods, challenges, applications, and also future research directions of aspect-based opinion mining.