Eliciting Attribute-Level User Needs From Online Reviews With Deep Language Models and Information Extraction

Eliciting user needs for individual components and features of a product or a service on a large scale is a key requirement for innovative design. Synthesizing data as an initial discovery phase of a design process is usually accomplished with a small number of participants, employing qualitative research methods such as observations, focus groups, and interviews. This leaves an entire swath of pertinent user behavior, preferences, and opinions not captured. Sentiment analysis is a key enabler for large-scale need finding from online user reviews generated on a regular basis. A major limitation of current sentiment analysis approaches used in design sciences, however, is the need for laborious labeling and annotation of large review datasets for training, which in turn hinders their scalability and transferability across different domains. This article proposes an efficient and scalable methodology for automated and large-scale elicitation of attribute-level user needs. The methodology builds on the state-of-the-art pretrained deep language model, BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), with new convolutional net and named entity recognition (NER) layers for extracting attribute, description, and sentiment words from online user review corpora. The machine translation algorithm BLEU (BiLingual Evaluation Understudy) is utilized to extract need expressions in the form of predefined part-of-speech combinations (e.g., adjective–noun, verb–noun). Numerical experiments are conducted on a large dataset scraped from a major e-commerce retail store for apparel and footwear to demonstrate the performance, feasibility, and potentials of the developed methodology.