Finding implicit features in consumer reviews for sentiment analysis

With the explosion of e-commerce shopping, customer reviews on the Web have become essential in the decision making process for consumers. Much of the research in this field focuses on explicit feature extraction and sentiment extraction. However, implicit feature extraction is a relatively new research field. Whereas previous works focused on finding the correct implicit feature in a sentence, given the fact that one is known to be present, this research aims at finding the right implicit feature without this pre-knowledge. Potential implicit features are assigned a score based on their co-occurrence frequencies with the words of a sentence, with the highest-scoring one being assigned to that sentence. To distinguish between sentences that have an implicit feature and the ones that do not, a threshold parameter is introduced, filtering out potential features whose score is too low. Using restaurant reviews and product reviews, the threshold-based approach improves the F1-measure by 3.6 and 8.7 percentage points, respectively.