Semantic Aspect Discovery for Online Reviews

Abstract

The number of opinions and reviews about different products and services is growing online. Users frequently look for important aspects of a product or service in the reviews. Usually, they are interested in semantic (i.e., sentiment-oriented) aspects. However, extracting semantic aspects with supervised methods is very expensive. We propose a domain independent unsupervised model to extract semantic aspects, and conduct qualitative and quantitative experiments to evaluate the extracted aspects. The experiments show that our model effectively extracts semantic aspects with correlated top words. In addition, the conducted evaluation on aspect sentiment classification shows that our model outperforms other models by 5-7% in terms of macro-average F1.