Efficient estimation of aspect weights

Jon Parker, Andrew Yates, Nazli Goharian, Wai Gen Yee

Abstract: Many websites encourage people to submit reviews of various products and services. We present and evaluate a novel approach to efficiently model and analyze the text within user reviews to estimate how much reviewers care about different aspects of a product (i.e., amenities, food, location, room, etc. of a hotel). Our approach performs statistically quite similar to the best existing method. However, our method for computing aspect weights is a linear time method while the current state of the art solution requires cubic time at best.