Comparative Opinion Mining: A Review

Opinion mining refers to the use of natural language processing, text analysis, and computational linguistics to identify and extract subjective information in textual material. Opinion mining, also known as sentiment analysis, has received a lot of attention in recent times, as it provides a number of tools to analyze public opinion on a number of different topics. Comparative opinion mining is a subfield of opinion mining which deals with identifying and extracting information that is expressed in a comparative form (e.g., "paper X is better than the Y"). Comparative opinion mining plays a very important role when one tries to evaluate something because it provides a reference point for the comparison. This paper provides a review of the area of comparative opinion mining. It is the first review that cover specifically this topic as all previous reviews dealt mostly with general opinion mining. This survey covers comparative opinion mining from two different angles. One from the perspective of techniques and the other from the perspective of comparative opinion elements. It also incorporates preprocessing tools as well as data set that were used by past researchers that can be useful to future researchers in the field of comparative opinion mining.