Parametric and Non-parametric User-aware Sentiment Topic Models

Zaihan Yang, Alexander Kotov, Aravind Mohan, Shiyong Lu

Abstract: The popularity of Web 2.0 has resulted in a large number of publicly available online consumer reviews created by a demographically diverse user base. Information about the authors of these reviews, such as age, gender and location, provided by many on-line consumer review platforms may allow companies to better understand the preferences of different market segments and improve their product design, manufacturing processes and marketing campaigns accordingly. However, previous work in sentiment analysis has largely ignored these additional user meta-data. To address this deficiency, in this paper, we propose parametric and non-parametric User-aware Sentiment Topic Models (USTM) that incorporate demographic information of review authors into topic modeling process in order to discover associations between market segments, topical aspects and sentiments. Qualitative examination of the topics discovered using USTM framework in the two datasets collected from popular online consumer review platforms as well as quantitative evaluation of the methods utilizing those topics for the tasks of review sentiment classification and user attribute prediction both indicate the utility of accounting for demographic information of review authors in opinion mining.