Search for: All records

Online consumer reviews contain rich yet implicit information regarding consumers’ preferences for specific aspects of products/services. Extracting aspects from online consumer reviews has been recognized as a valuable step in performing fine-grained analytical tasks (e.g. aspect-based sentiment analysis). Extant approaches to aspect extraction are dominated by discrete models. Despite explosive research interests in continuous-space language models in recent years, these models have yet to be explored for the task of extracting product/service aspects from online consumer reviews. In addition, previous continuous-space models for information extraction have largely overlooked the role of semantic information embedded in texts. In this study, we propose an approach of aspect extraction that leverages semantic information from WordNet in conjunction of building continuous-space language models from review texts. The experiment results with online restaurant reviews demonstrate that the WordNet-guided continuous-space language models outperform both discrete models and continuous-space language models without incorporating the semantic information. The research findings have important implications for understanding consumer preferences and improving business performances.