Comparative relation mining of customer reviews based on a hybrid CSR method

Abstract

Online reviews contain comparative opinions that reveal the competitive relationships of related products, help identify the competitiveness of products in the marketplace, and influence consumers’ purchasing choices. The Class Sequence Rule (CSR) method, which is previously commonly used to identify the comparative relations of reviews, suffers from low recognition efficiency and inaccurate generation of rules. In this paper, we improve on the CSR method by proposing a hybrid CSR method, which utilises dependency relations and the part-of-speech to identify frequent sequence patterns in customer reviews, which can reduce manual intervention and reinforce sequence rules in the relation mining process. Such a method outperforms CSR and other CSR-based models with an F-value of 84.67%. In different experiments, we find that the method is characterised by less time-consuming and efficient in generating sequence patterns, as the dependency direction helps to reduce the sequence length. In addition, this method also performs well in implicit relation mining for extracting comparative information that lacks obvious rules. In this study, the optimal CSR method is applied to automatically capture the deeper features of comparative relations, thus improving the process of recognising explicit and implicit comparative relations.