Abstract Eliciting informative user opinions from online reviews is a key success factor for innovative product design and development. The unstructured, noisy, and verbose nature of user reviews, however, often complicate large-scale need finding in a format useful for designers without losing important information. Recent advances in abstractive text summarization has created the opportunity to systematically generate opinion summaries from online reviews to inform the early stages of product design and development. However, two knowledge gaps hinder the applicability of opinion summarization methods in practice. First, there is a lack of formal mechanisms to guide the generative process with respect to different categories of product attributes and user sentiments. Second, the annotated training datasets needed for supervised training of abstractive summarization models are often difficult and costly to create. This article addresses these gaps by (1) devising an efficient computational framework for abstractive opinion summarization guided by specific product attributes and sentiment polarities, and (2) automatically generating a synthetic training dataset that captures various degrees of granularity and polarity. A hierarchical multi-instance attribute-sentiment inference mode is developed for assembling a high-quality synthetic dataset, which is utilized to fine-tune a pretrained language model for abstractive summary generation. Numerical experiments conducted on a large dataset scraped from three major e-Commerce retail store for apparel and footwear products indicate the performance, feasibility, and potentials of the developed framework. Several directions are provided for future exploration in the area of automated opinion summarization for user-centered design.
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Aspect-Sentiment-Guided Opinion Summarization for User Need Elicitation From Online Reviews
Extracting and analyzing informative user opinion from large-scale online reviews is a key success factor in product design processes. However, user reviews are naturally unstructured, noisy, and verbose. Recent advances in abstractive text summrization provide an unprecedented opportunity to systematically generate summaries of user opinions to facilitate need finding for designers. Yet, two main gaps in the state-of-the-art opinion summarization methods limit their applicability to the product design domain. First is the lack of capabilities to guide the generative process with respect to various product aspects and user sentiments (e.g., polarity, subjectivity), and the second gap is the lack of annotated training datasets for supervised learning. This paper tackles these gaps by (1) devising an efficient and scalable methodology for abstractive opinion summarization from online reviews guided by aspects terms and sentiment polarities, and (2) automatically generating a reusable synthetic training dataset that captures various degrees of granularity and polarity. The methodology contributes a multi-instance pooling model with aspect and sentiment information integrated (MAS), a synthetic data assembled using the results of the MAS model, and a fine-tuned pretrained sequence-to-sequence model “T5” for summary generation. Numerical experiments are conducted on a large dataset scraped from a major e-commerce retail store for sneakers to demonstrate the performance, feasibility, and potentials of the developed methodology. Several directions are provided for future exploration in the area of automated opinion summarization for user-centered product design.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2050052
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10387290
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Aspect-Sentiment-Guided Opinion Summarization for User Need Elicitation From Online Reviews
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1115/DETC2022-90108
