Resource evaluation: a novel application of opinion mining for competitive intelligence

Abstract

Competitive intelligence CI is known as identification of potential risk and opportunities by collecting and analysing information about the environment and competitors to help managers in making strategic decisions for an enterprise or company right on time. Information sources are always one of the difficulties to gain CI goals. With rapid development of internet and its usages in many areas, the web has become an excellent source for gathering information and also customer opinions. Recent opinion mining methods and application has only focused on product features and sentiment polarity detection. In this paper, we proposed a new method to extract opinion patterns from customer reviews and its application to evaluate resources or internal factors in an enterprise. Result, with a reasonable precision and recall, show that this method can be used for resource evaluation. Furthermore, this study opens a new way to competitive positioning and strategy development for any enterprise.