Automatically detecting and rating product aspects from textual customer reviews

This paper proposes a new approach to aspect-based sentiment analysis. The goal of our algorithm is to obtain a summary of the most positive and the most negative aspects of a specific product, given a collection of free-text customer reviews. Our approach starts by matching handcrafted dependency paths in individual sentences to find opinions expressed towards candidate aspects. Then, it clusters together different mentions of the same aspect by using a WordNet-based similarity measure. Finally, it computes a sentiment score for each aspect, which represents the overall emerging opinion of a group of customers towards a specific aspect of the product. Our approach does not require any seed word or domain-specific knowledge, as it only employs an off-the-shelf sentiment lexicon. We discuss encouraging preliminary results in detecting and rating aspects from on-line reviews of movies and MP3 players.