Visual opinion analysis of customer feedback data

TLDR

Online retailers gather extensive customer feedback through surveys, reviews, and comments, yet this data remains largely underexploited despite its importance for customer satisfaction. The study aims to present novel interactive methods for extracting and visualizing positive and negative customer opinions from comments and ratings. The authors develop a discrimination‑based extractor for opinion‑bearing terms, a reverse‑distance‑weighting mapping to associate attributes with sentiments, and a high‑dimensional visual summary that clusters reviews, displays thumbnail insights, and offers an interactive circular correlation map. Applied to real‑world online store and product review data, the techniques successfully identified product strengths and weaknesses, demonstrating their practical utility.

Abstract

Today, online stores collect a lot of customer feedback in the form of surveys, reviews, and comments. This feedback is categorized and in some cases responded to, but in general it is underutilized - even though customer satisfaction is essential to the success of their business. In this paper, we introduce several new techniques to interactively analyze customer comments and ratings to determine the positive and negative opinions expressed by the customers. First, we introduce a new discrimination-based technique to automatically extract the terms that are the subject of the positive or negative opinion (such as price or customer service) and that are frequently commented on. Second, we derive a Reverse-Distance-Weighting method to map the attributes to the related positive and negative opinions in the text. Third, the resulting high-dimensional feature vectors are visualized in a new summary representation that provides a quick overview. We also cluster the reviews according to the similarity of the comments. Special thumbnails are used to provide insight into the composition of the clusters and their relationship. In addition, an interactive circular correlation map is provided to allow analysts to detect the relationships of the comments to other important attributes and the scores. We have applied these techniques to customer comments from real-world online stores and product reviews from web sites to identify the strength and problems of different products and services, and show the potential of our technique.