Discovering Hidden Emotional Heterogeneity of Customers in Textual Reviews and its Influencing Factors

E-commerce platforms are recognizing the value of customer experience and are dedicating sections for customers to share reviews of the product purchased. Therefore, this study aimed to analyze Online Customer Review (OCR) to identify hidden emotion expressed about the purchasing experience and further identify factors relating to the product. Text-based emotion classification is a prominent and growing field to better understand human emotions. An integrated Information Gain-Recursive Feature Elimination (IG-RFE) and stacking ensemble learning were implemented to develop a predictive emotion classification model to identify the hidden emotions of the customers. Additionally, the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model was used to extract the influencing factors, providing further insight in OCR. The study extracted eight emotions from OCR and seven influencing factors from product’s attributes. The emotions included anger, anticipation, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise, and trust while the identified factors were quality, brand credibility, product functionality, usability, appearance, price, and functional effect. The extracted emotions and factors from the OCR provided valuable knowledge on the study. The findings showed knowledge gaps in emotion classification and customer behavior fields, suggesting further investigation for future study.