Consumer preference analysis based on text comments and ratings: A multi-attribute decision-making perspective

With the popularity of social media, extracting consumer preferences from online consumer-generated content is of vital importance for product/service providers to develop tailored marketing strategies. However, existing approaches face difficulties analyzing consumer preferences over different attributes of alternatives (restaurants, hotels, etc.), which hinders product/service providers from comprehensively understanding consumer choice decisions. To address this issue, we solve for the consumer preferences over the attributes represented by attribute weights based on consumers’ historical data, including text comments and overall ratings. Specifically, for each comment and a corresponding rating, we first employ sentiment analysis to calculate values of the attributes, and then develop a quadratic programming model to solve for the weights. Based on a stream of a consumer’s text comments and overall ratings, we can correspondingly obtain a stream of weights indexed by the comment time. We then model this stream of weights as hesitant judgments and employ a hesitant multiplicative programming method to solve for the final weights that fit the consumer’s preferences over attributes at the highest satisficing level. In the application of recommendation, our approach not only provides insights into the consumer’s preferences but also has higher prediction power compared with some state-of-the-art methods.