RETRACTED: Service complaint identification in hotel social media: A two-step classification approach

Abstract

Hotel social media provides access to dissatisfied customers and their experiences with services. However, due to massive topics and posts in social media, and the sparse distribution of complaint-related posts and, manually identifying complaints is inefficient and time-consuming. In this study, we propose a supervised learning method including training samples enlargement and classifier construction. We first identified reliable complaint and noncomplaint samples from the unlabeled dataset by using small labeled samples as training samples. Combining the labeled samples and enlarged samples, classification algorithms support vector machine and k-nearest neighbor were then adopted to build binary classifiers during the classifier construction process. Experimental results indicate the proposed method can identify complaints from social media efficiently, especially when the amount of labeled training samples is small. This study provides an efficient approach for hotel companies to distinguish a certain kind of consumer complaint information from large number of unrelated information in hotel social media.