Knowledge empowered prominent aspect extraction from product reviews

Abstract

Many existing systems for analyzing and summarizing customer reviews about products or service are based on a number of prominent review aspects. Conventionally, the prominent review aspects of a product type are determined manually. This costly approach cannot scale to large and cross-domain services such as Amazon.com, Taobao.com or Yelp.com where there are a large number of product types and new products emerge almost everyday. In this paper, we propose a novel method empowered by knowledge sources such as Probase and WordNet, for extracting the most prominent aspects of a given product type from textual reviews. The proposed method, ExtRA (Extraction of Prominent Review Aspects), (i) extracts the aspect candidates from text reviews based on a data-driven approach, (ii) builds an aspect graph utilizing the Probase to narrow the aspect space, (iii) separates the space into reasonable aspect clusters by employing a set ofproposed algorithms and finally (iv) generates K most prominent aspect terms or phrases which do not overlap semantically automatically without supervision from those aspect clusters. ExtRA extracts high-quality prominent aspects as well as aspect clusters with little semantic overlap by exploring knowledge sources. ExtRA can extract not only words but also phrases as prominent aspects. Furthermore, it is general-purpose and can be applied to almost any type of product and service. Extensive experiments show that ExtRA is effective and achieves the state-of-the-art performance on a dataset consisting of different product types.