Customer sentiment appraisal from user-generated product reviews: a domain independent heuristic algorithm

Social media give new opportunities in customer survey and market survey for design inspiration with comments posted online by users spontaneously, in an oral-near language, and almost free of biases. Opinion mining techniques are being developed, especially customer sentiment analysis. These techniques are most of the time based on a text parsing and costly learning techniques based on target or domain-dependent corpora for getting a fine understanding of users’ preferences. On the contrary, in this paper, we propose an overall sentiment rating algorithm, accurate enough to deliver an overall rating on a product review, without a tedious customization to a product domain or customer polarities. The developed algorithm starts by a text parsing, uses a Dictionary of Affect Language to rate the word tree leaves and uses a series of basic heuristics to calculate backward an overall sentiment rating for the review. We validate it on the example of a commercial home theatre system, comparing our automated sentiment predictions with the one of a group of fifteen test subjects, resulting in a satisfactory correlation.