Clustering product features for opinion mining

In sentiment analysis of product reviews, one important problem is to produce a summary of opinions based on product features/attributes (also called aspects). However, for the same feature, people can express it with many different words or phrases. To produce a useful summary, these words and phrases, which are domain synonyms, need to be grouped under the same feature group. Although several methods have been proposed to extract product features from reviews, limited work has been done on clustering or grouping of synonym features. This paper focuses on this task. Classic methods for solving this problem are based on unsupervised learning using some forms of distributional similarity. However, we found that these methods do not do well. We then model it as a semi-supervised learning problem. Lexical characteristics of the problem are exploited to automatically identify some labeled examples. Empirical evaluation shows that the proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.