Ranking products through online opinions: A text analysis and regret theory-based approach

• Published in: Applied soft computing 2024-06, Vol.158, p.111571, Article 111571
• Main Authors: Chen, Kejia, Zheng, Jingjing, Jin, Jian
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Group satisfaction; Online opinions; Product ranking; Purchase suggestions; Regret theory
• ISSN: 1568-4946; 1872-9681
• DOI: 10.1016/j.asoc.2024.111571

With the development of e-shopping, a list of similar products can be found with a large volume of valuable customer reviews online. However, it is generally difficult to compare various aspects of similar products effectively by understanding all relevant online opinions. To help consumers, in this study, how products are ranked according to online reviews is investigated. Firstly, an SC-LDA (Seed Constraint-Latent Dirichlet Allocation) model, which is an extension of the classical topic model LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation), is proposed to extract product features. The must-link and cannot-link seed constraints are invited to estimate the probability expansion/reduction value. They help to affect the topic allocation by additional constraints in Gibbs sampling for a higher accuracy on feature extraction. Secondly, an improved convolutional memory neural network model is devised to analyze the sentiment polarity. It takes the advantages of CNN (convolutional neural network) and Bi-LSTM (bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory) and performs dynamic pooling in CNN to prevent the loss of important features. Besides, the concept of group satisfaction degree is introduced, which makes products be compared according to the Regret Theory. It ranks products without a commonly applied reference point and take consumer psychology into considerations. Finally, in the case study, an illustrative example is presented to evaluate the proposed framework. Categories of experiments show that the proposed framework provides consumers with effective purchase suggestions. Permanent link to reproducible Capsule: https://doi.org/10.24433/CO.6445683.v1 and https://doi.org/10.24433/CO.2658577.v1. •An SC-LDA model is applied to extract product features from online opinions.•An improved convolutional memory neural network model is devised to analyze the sentiment polarity.•The Regret Theory is introduced for making comparisons on different products by taking group satisfaction degree into considerations.