Events

Prof. Thomas Otter
Professor of Quantitative Marketing
Faculty of Economics and Business
Goethe University Frankfurt

ABSTRACT

Observations of product and service reviews suggest that textual product reviews may contain statements that talk about the overall experience (“We had a great time”) or, similarly, whether to recommend a particular product. We argue that such statements encapsulate an overall assessment and hence are not independently informative about, but rather reflect overall ratings. We propose a model that allows for the distinction between topics that contribute to and topics that merely reflect an overall evaluation and apply it to a data set consisting of luxury hotel reviews. Compared to a standard supervised LDA, we find our model to better fit the data and to improve customer insights by resulting in more semantically coherent topics which point at specific attributes with positive and negative relationships to customers’ evaluation of their experience.