OpinionSeer: Interactive Visualization of Hotel Customer Feedback

TLDR

The rapid growth of Web technology has led to more hotel customers sharing opinions online, making effective visual analysis essential for business success. This paper presents OpinionSeer, an interactive visualization system for analyzing large collections of online hotel customer reviews. OpinionSeer uses a visualization‑centric opinion mining technique that models uncertainty, combines augmented scatterplots and radial visualizations, and applies subjective logic to organize subjective opinions across multiple levels. Case studies demonstrate OpinionSeer’s effectiveness in analyzing multi‑dimensional relationships and comparing group opinions, and suggest its applicability to other products or services.

Abstract

The rapid development of Web technology has resulted in an increasing number of hotel customers sharing their opinions on the hotel services. Effective visual analysis of online customer opinions is needed, as it has a significant impact on building a successful business. In this paper, we present OpinionSeer, an interactive visualization system that could visually analyze a large collection of online hotel customer reviews. The system is built on a new visualization-centric opinion mining technique that considers uncertainty for faithfully modeling and analyzing customer opinions. A new visual representation is developed to convey customer opinions by augmenting well-established scatterplots and radial visualization. To provide multiple-level exploration, we introduce subjective logic to handle and organize subjective opinions with degrees of uncertainty. Several case studies illustrate the effectiveness and usefulness of OpinionSeer on analyzing relationships among multiple data dimensions and comparing opinions of different groups. Aside from data on hotel customer feedback, OpinionSeer could also be applied to visually analyze customer opinions on other products or services.