A Data-Driven Approach to Product Usage Context Identification From Online Customer Reviews

This paper proposes a data-driven methodology to automatically identify product usage contexts from online customer reviews. Product usage context is one of the factors that affect product design, consumer behavior, and consumer satisfaction. The previous works identify the usage contexts using the survey-based method or subjectively determine them. The proposed methodology, on the other hand, uses machine learning and Natural Language Processing tools to identify and cluster usage contexts from a large volume of customer reviews. Furthermore, aspect sentiment analysis is applied to capture the sentiment toward a particular usage context in a sentence. The methodology is implemented to two data sets of products, i.e., laptop and tablet. The result shows that the methodology is able to capture relevant product usage contexts and cluster bigrams that refer to similar usage context. The aspect sentiment analysis enables the observation of a product’s position with respect to its competitors for a particular usage context. For a product designer, the observation may indicate a requirement to improve the product. It may also indicate a possible market opportunity in a usage context in which most of the current products are perceived negatively by customers. Finally, it is shown that overall rating might not be a strong indicator for representing customer sentiment toward a particular usage context, due to the moderate linear correlation for most of the usage contexts in the case study.