Mining marketing intelligence from online reviews using sentiment analysis

Abstract

Online product reviews have emerged as a powerful medium for generating electronic word-of-mouth. Many consumers share their opinions, post purchase experiences, and recommendations about products and services in online reviews that may be used by potential consumers to assist them in making product choices and purchase decisions. Users' opinions expressed in reviews are important for potential consumers to make well informed purchase decisions, and for product manufacturers to get insights about their products' strengths and weaknesses. This paper argues that online reviews are a rich source of marketing intelligence that can be extracted in the form of users' opinions by applying advanced text processing and analysis techniques. In particular, this paper proposes the use of sentiment analysis for extracting marketing intelligence from online reviews. The experimental results on hotel reviews show that sentiment analysis can be an effective way of deriving marketing intelligence and benchmarking information from online reviews.