Semisupervised Learning Based Opinion Summarization and Classification for Online Product Reviews

The growth of E-commerce has led to the invention of several websites that market and sell products as well as allow users to post reviews. It is typical for an online buyer to refer to these reviews before making a buying decision. Hence, automatic summarization of users' reviews has a great commercial significance. However, since the product reviews are written by nonexperts in an unstructured, natural language text, the task of summarizing them is challenging. This paper presents a semisupervised approach for mining online user reviews to generate comparative feature-based statistical summaries that can guide a user in making an online purchase. It includes various phases like preprocessing and feature extraction and pruning followed by feature-based opinion summarization and overall opinion sentiment classification. Empirical studies indicate that the approach used in the paper can identify opinionated sentences from blog reviews with a high average precision of 91% and can classify the polarity of the reviews with a good average accuracy of 86%.