Ranking products through online reviews: A method based on sentiment analysis technique and intuitionistic fuzzy set theory

Online product reviews have significant impacts on consumers’ purchase decisions. To support consumers’ purchase decisions, how to rank the products through online reviews is a valuable research topic, while research concerning this issue is still relatively scarce. This paper proposes a method based on the sentiment analysis technique and the intuitionistic fuzzy set theory to rank the products through online reviews. An algorithm based on sentiment dictionaries is developed to identify the positive, neutral or negative sentiment orientation on the alternative product concerning the product feature in each review. According to the identified positive, neutral and negative sentiment orientations, an intuitionistic fuzzy number is constructed for representing the performance of an alternative product concerning a product feature. The ranking of alternative products is determined by intuitionistic fuzzy weighted averaging (IFWA) operator and preference ranking organization methods for enrichment evaluations II (PROMETHEE II). A case study is given to illustrate the use of the proposed method. The comparisons and experiments are further conducted to illustrate the characteristics and advantages of the proposed method. Converting the identified positive, neutral and negative sentiment orientations into intuitionistic fuzzy numbers is a new idea for processing and fusing a large number of sentiment orientations of online reviews. Based on the proposed method, decision support system can be developed to support the consumers’ purchase decisions more conveniently.