토픽 모델링에 기반한 온라인 상품 평점 예측을 위한 온라인 사용 후기 분석

Online Reviews Analysis for Prediction of Product Ratings based on Topic Modeling

Customers have been affected by others’ opinions when they make a purchase. Thanks to the development of technologies, people are sharing their experiences such as reviews or ratings through online or social network services, However, although ratings are intuitive information for others, many reviews include only texts without ratings. Also, because of huge amount of reviews, customers and companies can’t read all of them so they are hard to evaluate to a product without ratings. Therefore, in this study, we propose a methodology to predict ratings based on reviews for a product. In a methodology, we first estimate the topic-review matrix using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation technic which is widely used in topic modeling. Next, we predict ratings based on the topic-review matrix using the artificial neural network model which is based on the backpropagation algorithm. Through experiments with actual reviews, we find that our methodology can predict ratings based on customers’ reviews. And our methodology performs better with reviews which include certain opinions. As a result, our study can be used for customers and companies that want to know exactly a product with ratings. Moreover, we hope that our study leads to the implementation of future studies that combine machine learning and topic modeling.