Leveraging the crowd to improve feature-sentiment analysis of user reviews

Crowdsourcing and machine learning are both useful techniques for solving difficult problems (e.g., computer vision and natural language processing). In this paper, we propose a novel method that harnesses and combines the strength of these two techniques to better analyze the features and the sentiments toward them in user reviews. To strike a good balance between reducing information overload and providing the original context expressed by review writers, the proposed system (1) allows users to interactively rank the entities based on feature-rating, (2) automatically highlights sentences that are related to relevant features, and (3) utilizes implicit crowdsourcing by encouraging users to provide correct labels of their own reviews to improve the feature-sentiment classifier. The proposed system not only helps users to save time and effort to digest the often massive amount of user reviews, but also provides real-time suggestions on relevant features and ratings as users generate their own reviews. Results from a simulation experiment show that leveraging on the crowd can significantly improve the feature-sentiment analysis of user reviews. Furthermore, results from a user study show that the proposed interface was preferred by more participants than interfaces that use traditional noun-adjective pair summarization, as the current interface allows users to view feature-related information in the original context.