FLAME: A Probabilistic Model Combining Aspect Based Opinion Mining and Collaborative Filtering

Aspect-based opinion mining from online reviews has attracted a lot of attention recently. Given a set of reviews, the main task of aspect-based opinion mining is to extract major aspects of the items and to infer the latent aspect ratings from each review. However, users may have different preferences which might lead to different opinions on the same aspect of an item. Even if fine-grained aspect rating analysis is provided for each review, it is still difficult for a user to judge whether a specific aspect of an item meets his own expectation. In this paper, we study the problem of estimating personalized sentiment polarities on different aspects of the items. We propose a unified probabilistic model called Factorized Latent Aspect ModEl (FLAME), which combines the advantages of collaborative filtering and aspect based opinion mining. FLAME learns users' personalized preferences on different aspects from their past reviews, and predicts users' aspect ratings on new items by collective intelligence. Experiments on two online review datasets show that FLAME outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the tasks of aspect identification and aspect rating prediction.