A text segmentation approach for automated annotation of online customer reviews, based on topic modeling

Abstract

Online customer review classification and analysis have been recognized as an important problem in many domains, such as business intelligence, marketing, and e-governance. To solve this problem, a variety of machine learning methods was developed in the past decade. Existing methods, however, either rely on human labeling or have high computing cost, or both. This makes them a poor fit to deal with dynamic and ever-growing collections of short but semantically noisy texts of customer reviews. In the present study, the problem of multi-topic online review clustering is addressed by generating high quality bronze-standard labeled sets for training efficient classifier models. A novel unsupervised algorithm is developed to break reviews into sequential semantically homogeneous segments. Segment data is then used to fine-tune a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model obtained for the reviews, and to classify them along categories detected through topic modeling. After testing the segmentation algorithm on a benchmark text collection, it was successfully applied in a case study of tourism review classification. In all experiments conducted, the proposed approach produced results similar to or better than baseline methods. The paper critically discusses the main findings and paves ways for future work