AN ONTOLOGY BASED SENTIMENT ANALYSIS : A Case Study

Business through e-commerce has become popular recently due to the massive amount of information available on internet. This has resulted in the abnormal number of reviews on websites like www.amazon.com and www.ebay.com, where customers express their opinions about the purchases they have made. Analyzing customer’s behavior has become very important for the organizations to find new market trends and insights. For the potential customer it becomes really difficult to get the knowledge about a product in the presence of such huge number of reviews and to sort the useful reviews and make good decision. The reviews available on these websites are in heterogeneous form i.e. structured and unstructured form and needs to be stored in a consistent format. Since good decision requires quality information in limited amount of time, Yaakub et, al.(2011) have proposed an ontology that uses a multidimensional model to integrate customer’s characteristics and their comments about products. This approach first identifies the entities and then sentiments present in the customers reviews related to mobiles are transformed into an attribute table by using a 7 point polarity system (-3 to 3). The research proposed by Yaakub et, al.(2011) is in developing stage. The limitation of their approach is that the ontology proposed by them is too general. The authors have shown their desire that it should be tested for a large group of products. Also, Yaakub et, al.(2011) have used very short and simple comments for the manual extraction of features for which a sentiment has been expressed. Usually comments present on e-commerce websites are not that short and simple. In order to fulfill the aim of this thesis project, a case study has been conducted on websites www.amazon.com and www.ebay.com and the ontology proposed by Yaakub et, al.(2011) has been refined for the three categories of mobile phones: smart phones, wet and dirty mobile phones and simple mobile phones. Further, sentiment analysis has been conducted by first using the ontology proposed by Yaakub et, al.(2011) and then by using the refined version of the ontologies for the three categories of mobile in order to compare the results