Information Processing and Management 58 (2021) 102613

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Information Processing and Management

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/infoproman

User-Defined SWOT analysis – A change mining perspective on

user-generated content
Li-Chen Cheng a, *, Kuanchin Chen b, Ming-Chu Lee c, Kua-Mai Li c
a
Department of Information and Finance Management, National Taipei University of Technology, Taipei 100, Taiwan, ROC
b
Department of Business Information Systems, Western Michigan University, USA
c
Department of Computer Science and Information Management, Soochow University, Taipei 100, Taiwan, ROC

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: User-generated content (UGC) based on customer opinions and experiences has increasingly
SWOT analysis become a rich resource of business opportunities. This study proposes a change mining frame­
Sentiment analysis work to address the key shortcomings of the traditional SWOT analysis, including subjectivity in
User-generated content
defining factors, lack of empirical validation, inflexible to meet the changing environment, and
Competitive intelligence
Change mining
lack of actionable steps. Product reviews were collected for several brands from Amazon.com.
Consumer sentiment was calculated to build an aspect-based opinion database, followed by the
application of change mining to the opinion database for different generations of products.
Factors were then extracted for the four key categories of SWOT. Our approach not only answers
the four key shortcomings of traditional SWOT analysis, but also offers additional opportunities,
such as the ability to monitor trends, and flexibility to frame SWOT factors based on desired time
periods. Further managerial insights are provided.

1. Introduction

SWOT (strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats) Analysis has long been used as a strategic planning tool to assess internal
capabilities (strengths and weaknesses) of a company and external situations the company confronts (threats and opportunities).
Successful strategies derived from it are assumed to be based on a good fit between the internal capabilities and external situations
(Agarwal, Grassl, & Pahl, 2015). The simplicity in the process to perform the analysis and outcome presentation has won its
wide-spared adoption across industries.
Despite the popularity of SWOT Analysis, it has received criticisms on the grounds of theoretical soundness and practical usefulness.
Examples of shortcomings are:

1 High-level subjectivity in defining SWOT factors:

Traditional SWOT Analysis is merely superficial descriptive bullet points that cover high-level perceptions, which are mostly
descriptive and cannot be easily implemented(Hill & Westbrook, 1997). For this reason, perceptions used to define the four
quadrants of SWOT often cloud reality than reveal it(Lippitt, 2003). Such a simplified view from SWOT leads to many strategic
planning errors(Pickton & Wright, 1998).

* Corresponding author:
E-mail address: lijen.cheng@gmail.com (L.-C. Cheng).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2021.102613
Received 20 January 2021; Received in revised form 21 March 2021; Accepted 22 April 2021
Available online 10 May 2021
0306-4573/© 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
L.-C. Cheng et al. Information Processing and Management 58 (2021) 102613

2 Lack of empirical validation

Traditional SWOT analysis also suffers from its qualitative nature based on subjective assessments. As a result, it should be
supplemented with additional quantitative analyses to be relevant(Gürel & Tat, 2017; Pickton & Wright, 1998) . As Gurel & Tat’s
review shows that such a two-step approach (SWOT first, and quantitative analysis next) has generated a proliferation of quan­
titative methods with no consensus and uniformity in capabilities.
3 Lack of Timely Response to the Changing Environment
SWOT analysis takes a snapshot view where the “good” or the “bad” are measured at one point in time in an evolving world of
business, which is an unrealistic view (Koch, 2000; Vlados, 2019). SWOT should be revised to have organic capabilities for the
changing environment, since the traditional approach of SWOT uses a mechanistic perception that often leads to a superficial list of
items inactionable for strategic management(Vlados, 2019).
4 Lack of actionable steps
Because of the above issues of high-level subjective factors with no or little empirical validation, SWOT fails at leading the
management to actionable steps(Gürel & Tat, 2017). As a result, the usefulness of SWOT is hampered.

As these above shortcomings hinder strategy formulation and implementation, some strategic planning experts even go as far as
abandoning the use of it all together. This is also reflected in the industry survey showing that managers may even distrust SWOT
(Fehringer, 2007). However, such a drastic approach to abandon SWOT requires new methods or tools that cause changes in existing
business practice, corporate culture and even institutional learning, which all come at additional costs. Therefore, studies also take the
revitalization approach to address the shortcomings of SWOT. This is broken into two key categories: one-step approach where
traditional SWOT is revised to address existing shortcomings, and two-step approach that couples the traditional SWOT with some
form of MCDM (multi-criteria decision-making) or other quantification methods.
For example, Agarwal, Grassl & Pahl’s (2015) Meta-SWOT extends the traditional SWOT analysis with a process that requires a
company to engage in active applications of resource-based view by evaluating SWOT factors through four criteria (VRIO or value,
rare, inimitable & organization). Strategic fit of the four components of SWOT is provided by actively engaging in mapping factors to
those components, company resources and internal capabilities. The method requires estimating factor weighting, degree of urgency
and probability, which enables quantitative empirical validation, but at the expense of a fair amount of subjective estimation.
Similarly, the two-step approach (SWOT first and quantitative models next), such as combining SWOT with Analytic Hierarchy Process
(AHP), provides the benefit of factor quantification and factor weighting that aim to address the first two shortcomings of SWOT.
Although the Meta-SWOT approach allows for the quantification of SWOT factors, the process of VRIO is a complex process that
may require subjectivity in estimating factor-weighting and other required elements in the process. Despite theoretical soundness and
practical popularity, MCDM approaches (such as AHP) used together with traditional SWOT in the two-step construction above either
requires multiple pairwise comparisons (e.g., Solangi et al., 2019; Abdel-Basset, Mohamed, & Smarandache, 2018) or subjectivity in
the quantitation process. Both of the above approaches improve over the traditional SWOT in that quantitation becomes possible that is
frequently done in a systematic way. Despite the benefits provided, changes in the business environment require recalibration of SWOT
factors, their weights and probability, which not only involves subjective estimations, but also requires time-consuming iterations to
arrive at the desired quantitative representations. In order for them to provide actionable steps, someone on the review board needs to
have the working knowledge of the competition and the ability to distil consumer expectations (Huang, Yang, & Teng, 2018), both of
which are difficult to stay abreast of in today’s changing environment.
In this present study, we propose an approach to build SWOT factors from consumer expectations by analyzing changes in user-
generated contents (UGC) (Ghani, Hamid, Hashem, & Ahmed, 2019; Lee, Yang, Chen, Wang, & Sun, 2016; Tsai, Chen, Hu, & Chen,
2020). User-generated content (UGC) containing customer reviews and opinions can be a rich source of information and a valuable
asset to a business (Saif, He, Fernandez, & Alani, 2016; Wu, Li, Shen, & He, 2020). Analyzing UGC for SWOT presents several benefits.
First, it takes the consumer’s point of view in the competition rather than how the management sees the competition. Strategies
derived from this consumer-centric approach will be highly relevant to customers. They also reduce subjectivity imposed by the
unilateral view from the company’s management. Second, by analyzing consumer’s voice, it provides an empirical validation of SWOT
factors and also actionable steps. Third, UGC adds benefits over the traditional survey or focus group approaches in many ways,
including providing large sample size for better generalizability, free from influence of moderator or group leader, less likely to suffer
from the Hawthorne effect, etc. Fourth, our approach offers an efficient opportunity of using SWOT in a changing environment as
recalibration requires only a systematic re-parsing of UGCs. This re-parsing could provide additional benefits, such as chunking time
periods, monitoring of trends, and ability to timely address changes in user preferences. Further efficiency may be provided by storing
pre-parsed models for later consumptions.
To the best of our knowledge, there has been no study utilizing sentiment analysis on UGC for automatic SWOT analysis. The
supporting techniques to make this happen include natural language processing and aspect-based sentiment analysis that aimed to
extract meaningful information from unstructured review data. In order to identify potential risks, it is important for companies to
collect and to analyze information about their competitors’ products and plans. Based on this competitor analysis, they can identify the
relative weaknesses and strengths of their own products, and can also design new products and campaigns aimed at countering those of
their competitors (McGonagle, 2016). The main contributions of this study are:

1 It is among the first to propose and empirically verify a framework which integrates several machine learning techniques to
identify factors to revitalize SWOT analysis.

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2 The proposed framework contains several modules for transforming social media data into actionable knowledge. The pre-
processing module includes extraction and analysis of a product review dataset from Amazon.com. The change mining mod­
ule can be used to explore SWOT analysis from the relevant aspect-based opinion database.
3 We define a novel SWOT analysis map mined from the aspect-based opinion database. The visualized results convey rich in­
formation to support management in the process of effective strategy creation, execution, monitoring and adjustment.
4 The shortcomings of traditional SWOT analysis are addressed through the above approaches of our proposed framework.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In the next section, we review the relevant literature related to opinion mining,
change mining, and competitive intelligence. Section 3 provides an overview of the proposed competitive intelligence mining
framework. In Section 4, we describe the methods for mining changes in competitive intelligence in detail. In Section 5, we present our
conclusions and some directions for future research.

2. Related work

2.1. Aspect-based mining sentiment analysis

Sentiment or opinion analysis has recently become a popular research area drawing a lot of scholarly attentions (Li, Wu, & Wang,
2020; B. Liu, 2015; Piryani, Madhavi, & Singh, 2017). It is generally carried out either at the document, sentence, or attribute level
(Pergola, Gui, & He, 2019; Piryani et al., 2017; Wu et al., 2020; Zhao, Han, Meng, He, & Zhang, 2017). Sentiment analysis at the
document level is based on categorization of reviews based on the overall sentiment or polarity extracted from each document. After
the extraction, machine learning models, such as the Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Naïve Bayes models (Balazs & Velásquez,
2016; Ravi & Ravi, 2015), are used for prediction, association, clustering and other purposes.
Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA), as a sub-category of sentiment analysis, aims to extract “aspects” or main concepts along
with their defining attributes and sentiment values (Al-Smadi, Al-Ayyoub, Jararweh, & Qawasmeh, 2019; B. Liu, 2015). ABSA allows
for real-time analysis by following consistent criteria for aspect extraction. Several forms of SemEval ABSA have been introduced since
2014 (SE-ABSA14) to 2016 (SE-ABSA16). They provide some valuable benchmark datasets annotated with aspect terms and polarity
for each review (Maria Pontiki et al., 2014; Pontiki et al., 2016; Pontiki, Galanis, Papageorgiou, Manandhar, & Androutsopoulos,
2015). Studies in ABSA have improved on the methodology and applications (Bornebusch et al., 2014; Brychcín, Konkol, & Stein­
berger, 2014; Patra, Soumik, Das, & Sivaji, 2014).
Sentence-level ABSA, a subtask of SemEval 2016 (Pontiki et al., 2016), aims at predicting the sentiment of each aspect term in a
given sentence. Several different classifiers have been proposed to identify the aspect categories predefined by experts (Hercig,
Brychcín, Svoboda, & Konkol, 2016; Xenos, Theodorakakos, Pavlopoulos, Malakasiotis, & Androutsopoulos, 2016). Identifying im­
plicit features is also important for the extraction of information from comprehensive ABSA results (Tubishat, Idris, & Abushariah,
2018)
In a previous work (Cheng & Huang, 2019), we collected text data across several products and annotated aspect terms based on the
analyses by panels of experts and approach taken by SE-ABSA16. This study developed a new technique to improve the efficiency of
product feature exaction and a novel association-based method to discover the implicit features from product reviews. The present
study is an extension of the ABSA technique proposed in our previous work aiming to address the key issues of traditional SWOT
analysis reviewed in the previous section. The resulting new framework has the advantage of the aggregation of reviews and extraction
of consumers’ preferences based on the ABSA mining results.

2.2. Change mining

Association rule mining refers to a technique applied in market basket analysis using a large dataset for finding interesting asso­
ciations or relationships between items. Descriptive patterns such as X→Y, where X refers to the conditional part and Y refers to the
consequent part, are defined as association rules. “Support” and “confidence” are performance metrics that measure the strength of
that rule. “Support” is the proportion of records that include both the conditional and consequent parts of an association rule over all
records in a database. The support of an association rule supp(X → Y) = supp(X ∪ Y) = σ(X ∪ Y)/|D|, where σ(X ∪ Y) refers to number of
records containing both X and Y, and |D| is total number of records in the dataset. For example, the support of rule {A, B}→{C} is supp
({A, B, C}) calculated as the proportion of records in the database including {A,B,C}. “Confidence” indicates the conditional proba­
bility of records having a conditional part also include the consequent part. Confidence of rule X→Y is conf(X→Y) = supp(X→Y)/supp
(X).
Change mining is aimed at detecting the differences in association rules, for example, differences in customer behavior, between
two datasets across various periods. Association rule change mining techniques are, therefore, suitable for evaluating transaction data
and detecting any changes associated with customer behavior.
The first change mining research conducted by B. Liu, Hsu, Han, and Xia (2000) was designed as a contextual approach to change
mining in the form of a decision tree for anticipating changes in customer behavior. Song, Kim, and Kim (2001) establishd a detection
model for automatically identifying changes in customer behaviors through the mining of association rules from databases during
different periods.
Based on the similarities and differences between various rules, users choose among the datasets to determine which type of rule
changes can be used. The following types of change mining patterns have been defined (Cheng, Chu, & Shiue, 2015; Huang et al.,

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2018):

Ø Emerging patterns refer to two rules having the same conditional part and the same consequent part, and correspondingly, there is a
significant increase in “support” from one dataset to another.
Ø Unexpected changes refer to the rules that have a similar conditional part but a different consequent part.
Ø Added patterns refer to new rules which are only present in the current dataset, while disappearing patterns refer to the rules that
are only present in the past dataset.

Several studies based on the concepts of Song et al. (2001) have appeared (Cheng et al., 2015; Huang et al., 2018). A patent trend
change mining (PTCM) approach has been applied by (D. R. Liu, Shih, Liau, & Lai, 2009) to detect the changes in patent trends, to assist
managers in establishing appropriate business strategies. Huang et al. (2018) proposed a novel classifiable sequential patterns mining
technique for detecting changes. Based on the obtained results, managers can ascertain the reason why changes occur over a period of
time and then make the appropriate response accordingly.

2.3. SWOT analysis

SWOT analysis is a strategic management tool commonly used to analyze an organization’s internal resources and external
environment. Traditional SWOT analysis identifies factors for four categories (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats)
through a series of subjective qualitative assessments (Gürel & Tat, 2017). A variety of frameworks have been proposed to enrich the
SWOT analysis and facilitate strategic planning for the organization (Hill & Westbrook, 1997; Pickton & Wright, 1998). For example,
Vlados (2019) proposed a dynamic internal and external environment analysis framework which integrated SWOT analysis with
evolutionary concepts for the creation of a business plan.
These existing strategies were still based on subjective assessments, and hard to validate (Gürel & Tat, 2017). Multi-criteria de­
cision making (MCDM) techniques were proposed to give SWOT a somewhat quantitative orientation on factor weighting, but the
process of conducting factor weighting in these techniques is less than effective (Gürel & Tat, 2017). Abdel-Basset et al. (2018)
developed a novel SWOT analysis framework integrated with the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) which was successful applied in a
real case study of the Starbucks Company. Solangi, Tan, Mirjat, & Ali (2019) proposed a framework that combines AHP and the Fuzzy
Technique for Order Performance by Similarity to Ideal Solution (F-TOPSIS) methodologies to determine energy strategies and
planning(Solangi, Tan, Mirjat, & Ali, 2019). As pair-comparison is required in AHP to establish factor weights for each pair of factors,
this comparison may not scale well, especially when such re-comparison is needed every time new factors are added or new changes to
the organization’s environment.
Agarwal et al. (2015) developed a Meta-SWOT framework based on a resource-based view. The proposed process could guide
company staff to explore the factors according to value, rarity, inimitability & organization (VRIO) criteria. Despite their attempt to

Fig. 1. Proposed framework

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structure SWOT factors, a fair amount of subjective assessment of factor weighting, degree of urgency and probability is still needed.
Although efforts of improving SWOT span across decades, newly proposed methods continue to suffer from one or more issues
identified at the beginning of this article, namely (a) subjectivity in defining SWOT factors, (b) lack of empirical validation, (c) lack of
timely response to the changing environment, and (d) lack of actionable steps.
User generated content (UGC) in product reviews provides new opportunities to address these issues. Customer reviews have
become a rich source of information for companies to tap into to what the consumers are thinking about their products or services.
Kim, Dwivedi, Zhang, and Jeong (2016) extracted market insights through a comparison of UGC between two leading smartphone
manufacturers. Jin, Ji, and Gu (2016) offered comparative descriptions of competitive products by analyzing opinion sentences,
features in the online product reviews. Lee et al. (2016) developed a perceptual map method to categorize the company’s and its
competitors’ products to visualize their different positions. Therefore, mining UGC allows one to peek into objective SWOT factors
from the consumers, which is an empirical validation of actional items by itself. If the process of mining is automated, activities such as
filtering, sorting and re-formatting can all be performed to provide timely results. The present study aims to fulfil this goal by
addressing the above four issues of traditional SWOT analysis.

3. The proposed framework

In this section, we proposed a framework for automated SWOT analysis which contains several modules including one for data pre-
processing, opinion change mining and a SWOT report mining module. Product reviews of tablets were collected from Amazon.com. A
schematic representation of the proposed framework is shown in , and a brief description of the problem, variable definitions, and an
example are outlined in the following sections.

3.1. Data collection and pre-processing

3.1.1. Overview of data pre-processing

A web crawler was developed to download product reviews of brand-name tablets from Amazon.com. Tablets are selected because
they have clear generations and competitions among each generation. Brands with clear product generations signify key business
priorities and offer the best insights on generational improvements to stay in the competition. As these are the priorities of a company’s
core business, they play a central role to SWOT.
The crawled product reviews were then stored in a database for pre-processing. The pre-processing steps comprised tokenization,
stop word removal, stemming, Stanford POS tagger(Manning et al., 2014), and feature extraction(Cheng & Huang, 2019; Medhat,
Hassan, & Korashy, 2014; Pontiki et al., 2016) and representation. Each product review usually includes several sentences and a
product rating. We first summarized the product specifications as described on the brand’s website and consulted with experts to
define aspect categories. Aspect-based analysis was used to identify the sentiment orientations of the reviewers toward different
product features. The techniques used in this module are based on those proposed in previous studies (Cheng & Huang, 2019; Cheng &
Lin, 2019) on movie reviews. Despite both movies and tablets are both experience goods, satisfaction of tablets requires additional
assessment of usefulness (e.g., speed, features, design, functionality, etc.) over just story and visual & auditory effects from movies.
Therefore, expanding the algorithm into product reviews provides further verifications of the algorithm’s efficacy.

3.1.2. An illustration of Aspect-based analysis

Fig. 2 shows an example of a crawled product review.
After NLP preprocessing, the review in the above example is separated into four sentences. We parsed the sentences using the
Stanford NLP Parser. Guided by our previous study (Cheng & Huang, 2019), product features in the forms of nouns and noun phrases
were first extracted from these review sentences. These features are compared against the features in the predefined aspect categories
to identify appropriate aspects for each sentence. Since a sentence may be a compound sentence with more than one concepts (e.g., “I
like the design, but the price is too high for the performance”), extracting sentiment at the aspect level (e.g., “design” aspect and “CP”
or “cost-performance” aspect) as opposed to at the sentence level will allow us to distil the true intention of the sentence. The part of
the sentence for each extracted aspect is then analysed for its sentiment using the approach proposed in Cheng & Huang (2019). The
resulting aspects and their corresponding sentiment values are then represented as aspect-sentiment pairs (e.g., (Design, positive), and
(CP, negative)) stored in an aspect-sentiment database for later use. An example of this process is shown in Table 1. As shown in
Table 1, the results of preprocessing the product review in Fig. 1 are a collection of the following aspect-sentiment pairs: [(Apple,
positive), (Design, positive), (Design, positive), (CP, negative), (Battery, positive)].

This is a nice iPad.

The mini is the perfect size for home use and on the go.
I like the design, but the price is too high for the performance.
Battery life in my experience has been excellent
Fig. 2. Example of crawled review

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Table 1
Example of aspect-sentiment pairs
Review sentences aspect-sentiment pairs

This is a nice iPad. (Apple, positive)

The mini is the perfect size for home use and on the go. (Design, positive)
I like the design, but the price is too high for the performance. (Design, positive), and (CP, negative)
Battery life in my experience has been excellent (Battery, positive)

3.1.3. Representation of Aspect-sentiment pairs

Definition: Aspect-sentiment pairs
An aspect-sentiment pair consists of an aspect and a relevant sentiment. When an aspect and its sentiment occur in one sentence,
they are called an aspect-sentiment pair.
T = [product, (aspect1, sentiment1), …, (aspect n, sentiment n), rating)]

where T is product review, and rating is the user’s numeric rating of the product in the product review, and (aspect x, sentiment x) is an
aspect-sentiment pair.
For example,
[P1, (App, Negative), (Hardware, Positive), P]
The aspect-sentiment database, Df, was composed of aspect-sentiment pairs with |Df| being number of records in Df. Each record is a
collection of aspect-sentiment pairs extracted from all sentences in a product review. Table 2 shows a partial example of the aspect-
sentiment database.

3.2. Association classification module

The records in the aspect-sentiment database are then subject to the association analysis. Association rules generated are in the
following format:
Product, (aspect 1, sentiment 1) … (aspect n, sentiment n) ⇒ rating, where the conditional part includes a set of distinct aspect-
sentiment pairs. The consequent part is the categorical rating with these values: positive (P), negative (N) and neutral (NE).
For example, the following is a possible association rule about tablets
P1, (App, Positive), (Battery, Negative), (CP, Positive) → N
From the extracted rules we can observe which user was satisfied with what attributes of product P1. The above example shows that
even though the person liked the App’s functionality as shown in the first aspect-sentiment pair, the consequent part of the rule shows
that his or her overall satisfaction with the product P1 is still negative. Association analysis comes with a set of performance metrics.
The most well-known metric is “Support”, which refers to the proportion of records containing both the antecedent and consequent
parts of a rule over all records in the database. Performance metrics are calculated for each association rule for use in later sections.

3.3. Opinion change mining module

3.3.1. Extraction of Association rules from aspect-sentiment database

The aspect-sentiment database is further analyzed to extract association rules. First, clusters of records in the aspect-sentiment
database were created according to different product generations of each brand. Second, association rule mining was then applied
to the aspect-sentiment pairs in the clusters to extract frequent association rule patterns based on different products in different
product generations.
The resulting association rules are then stored in the rule databases. There were several rule databases extracted from various
product brands and their product generations. For example, if a product Pi has two generations G1. and G2, there are two rule databases
RG1 and RG2. Rules rG1 G2
p and rq are extracted from the corresponding rule databases R
G1
and RG2, where p=1,2,… and q=1,2,… are rule
G1 G2 G1 G2
numbers. |R | and | R | are total number of rules in R and R , respectively.

3.3.2. Three types of changes in association rules

The objective of change mining is to detect changes in the composition or performance of association rules. These changes are in

Table 2
Example of the aspect-sentiment database
ID R_ID Product Aspect -sentiment pairs Rating

001 001 P1 (App, Positive), (Hardware, Negative), (CP value, Positive), (Battery, Positive) 4
…
010 002 P1 (Hardware, Negative), (Display, Negative) 2
011 002 P2 (Display, Negative) 3

*ID: record ID; R_ID: review ID; Rating: user’s numeric rating.

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two forms, namely vertical change that refers to changes in association rules when comparing product generations, and horizontal
change that refers to changes in association rules when comparing different product brands. A key concept to detect change is to be
able to measure similarity between rules. Change is small if two rules are similar to each other. Conversely, change is large if two rules
are dissimilar. The definition of similarity of association rules is described below.
Definition: Similarity of conditional part of a rule
An association rule is typically represented this way: X → Y, where X is the conditional part and Y is the consequent part. The
similarity of two rules rG1 G2
p and rq extracted from rule databases R
G1
and RG2 is defined as:
⃒ ( )⃒ ∑
( ) ⃒⃒ComItem rpG1 , rqG2 ⃒⃒ G G x
p∈ComItem(rp 1 ,rq 2 ) pqk
sim rpG1 , rqG2 = (⃒ ⃒ ⃒ ⃒) × ⃒
⃒ G1 ⃒ ⃒ G2 ⃒ ⃒
( )⃒
⃒ (1)
max ⃒rp ⃒, ⃒rq ⃒ G G
⃒ComItem rp , rq 2 ⃒
1

where ComItem(rpG1 , rqG2 ) represents the set of common aspects between the two rules rG1 G2
p and rq . The value of xpqk is either 0 or 1. When
G1 G2
the aspect sentiments of rules rp and rq are the same, the value will be 1, otherwise it will be 0.
The change mining module is composed of the following steps to compare rules from the rule databases:

(1) For rules rG1 G2

p and rq calculate the degree of similarity in the conditional parts of the two rules.
(2) Classify change in the rules into emerging, slight and unexpected change according to the definitions below.

Definition: Emerging changes in opinion rules

Emerging change happens when two rules rG1 G2
p and rq have the same conditional and consequent parts, but their support values are
significantly different (i.e., exceed the threshold θ defined by domain experts, such as in (Shih, Liu, & Hsu, 2008; Song, kyeong Kim, &
Kim, 2001), or by corporate policy). In other words, the following three conditions need to be satisfied for rules to be considered part of
emerging changes, (a) sim(rG1, G2 G G2
p rq ) =1, (b) Yp = Yq, where Yp is the consequent part of rule p, and (c) abs(support(rp ) – support(rq )) >
θ, where θ is a preset threshold.
For example:
A-brand pad has two generations (G1 and G2). After mining opinions for the two generations, two rule databases, RG1 and RG2 are
created. Suppose rule p from G1 (rG1 G2
p ) and rule q from G2 (rq ) both have the same conditional and consequent parts, such as the
following. Eq. (1) shows that the similarity between these two rules would be 1:

rG1
p : (Battery, Positive), (UX, Positive) → P rule support=0.8
rG2
q : (Battery, Positive), (UX, Positive) → P rule support=0.4

If the difference between the two support values (0.8 – 0.4) is greater than θ, then this signifies an emerging change large enough for
attention.
Definition: Slight changes in opinion rules
Rule rG2 G1
q shows slight changes in opinion rules with respect to rp when the conditional parts are partially similar as measured by
equation (1) above, but the consequent parts of the two rules are the same. In other words, two conditions have to be met, (a) t < sim
(rG1, G2
p rq ) < 1, where t is the threshold agreed upon by the domain experts, and (b) Yp = Yq, where Yp is the consequent part of rule p.
For example:
Let us look again at A-brand pad for G1 and G2 generations. The rule extracted from the G1 rule database RG1is

rG1
p : (Battery, Positive)→ P
and the rule extracted from the G2 rule database RG2is
rG2
q : (Battery, Positive), (UX, Positive) → P

Since the conditional parts of the above two rules differ by one aspect-sentiment pair, the similarity calculated will likely be closer
to 1. To qualify for the slight change, the similarity of the conditional parts should exceed a given threshold (t) as specified by domain
experts or company policy for the rules.
Definition: Unexpected changes in opinion rules
Rule rG2
q could change unexpectedly with respect to rp
G1,
when the conditional parts remain the same or are similar, but the
consequent parts of the two rules are quite different.
For example:

rG1
p : (Battery, Positive), (UX, Positive) → P
rG2
q : (Battery, Positive), (UX, Positive) →N

In the above example, we can observe that the similarity of the conditional parts between rules rG1 G2
p and rq is 1, but the consequent
parts are opposite.

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3.4. SWOT report mining by rule change detection

This study proposes a SWOT report mining framework inspired by the idea of change mining. We follow the core concept of SWOT
analysis which is a powerful business analysis tool for identifying the key internal and external factors affecting different companies.
By examining and comparing consumer sentiments toward two rival companies, we are able to gain invaluable insights into the nature
of consumer reputation.
For product P1 and its competition P2 we have two generations G1 and G2 giving rise to 2 × 2 rule databases RG1 G2 G1 G2
P1 , RP1 , RP2 , RP2 .
G1 G2 G1 G2
Rules rp and rq are extracted from the corresponding rule databases, R and R , where p = 1, 2… and q = 1, 2… are rule numbers,
and |RG1| is the number of rules in RG1 and | RG2| is the number of rules in RG2
The result of change mining can be applied to conduct SWOT analysis. After mining using the different product generation rule
databases G1 andG2, we can obtain three forms of change defined previously. The definitions of the four SWOT categories (Strengths,
Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) are as follows:
Definition: Strength patterns
If rules between generations of the same product are either part of emerging changes or slight changes with positive consequents,
they are defined as the strength of the product. Since this is a comparison of similar rules between product generations, the common
aspects captured by the rules are areas of the product continued to be valued by consumers from one product generation to another.
Another form of strength is rules belonging to unexpected changes, but the negative sentiment flips into positive.
Definition: Weakness patterns
If the rules belonging to the set of emerging changes or slight changes but the consequent parts of these rules are negative, they are
defined as product weaknesses. The negative sentiment on the product aspects carried over from one generation to another signifies the
areas that the company has not addressed during generational change. As a result, they continue to be product issues. Another form of
weakness is rules belonging to unexpected changes, but the positive sentiment flips into negative.
Definition: Opportunity patterns
Opportunity is defined as two rules, one from the company’s rule database and the other one from the database about competitors,
having the same conditional parts, but the consequent part of the company’s product is positive, and competitor’s is negative. This is an
opportunity for the company to continue expanding for a sustainable advantage over the competition.
Definition: Threat patterns
The conditional parts are the same between rules about company’s product and the competition, but the consequent parts of the
two rules are different. However, the consequent part of the company’s product is negative, but competitor’s is positive. This shows
that consumers viewed the product features of the competition outperforming the company’s, thus causing a threat to the company’s
profitability.
The above definitions of SWOT categories are summarized in Table 3.
In summary, strength and weakness patterns are defined by accessing sentiment changes between product generations from the
company, whereas opportunity and threat patterns are identified by comparing company’s products and the competitor’s.

Table 3
Application of change mining results to conduct SWOT analysis
Procedures Strength patterns Weakness patterns

Mining the changes in different generations of the same brand of Comparison between product Comparison between product generations:
products generations: • Emerging changes: Generation G1=N, Generation
• Emerging changes: G2=N
Generation G1=P*, • Slight changes:
Generation G2=P Generation G1=N, Generation G2=N
• slight changes: • Unexpected changes: Generation G1=P,
Generation G1=P, Generation G2=N
Generation G2=P
• Unexpected changes: Generation
G1=N,
Generation G2=P

Opportunity patterns Threat patterns

Mining changes in the same generation of different Comparison between company’s product and Comparison between company’s product and
products competitor’s: competitor’s:
• Emerging changes: company’s=P, • Emerging changes: company’s=N,
competitor’s=N competitor’s=P
• Slight changes: company’s=P, competitor’s=N • Slight changes: company’s=N, competitor’s=P
*
Positive sentiment.

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4. Experiments and results

4.1. Data collection and processing

We collected all product reviews about tablets posted on Amazon.com before November 2013, together with reviewer profiles. This
website was selected because it has a large consumer base and publishes many consumer reviews. Consumers search this database and
these reviews for specific information regarding the functional attributes of the product they are interested in. The product descriptions
on Amazon.com place heavy emphasis on the functional features and benefits. Comparison tables and bullet points highlight objective
attributes. Collecting and summarizing UGC, and the compliments and complaints contained therein, can help product designers to
understand customer choices and preferences.
Each online product review includes the title, the text, and the rating of the review. Altogether, 21366 reviews were collected from
Amazon.com. A user rating of 4 or more represents a positive opinion. Otherwise, the review was negative. The total number of
positive reviews was 18108 and the total number of negative reviews was 3258.
In the SWOT investigation, we analyzed the UGC for two generations of high-end tablets competing in the US market, specifically
Apple, ASUS, and Samsung products with Apple_1 representing the first generation and Apple_2 representing the second generation.
Table 4 provides a brief summary of our data and the distribution of reviews for different brands and different generations of products.
Association rule mining, based on the pros and cons of the products, is used to evaluate the overall score of the reviews given by
individual reviewers. Analysis was then conducted to find the proportion of positive and negative feedback for each product, as a
reference for characterizing the properties of the products from each review.
For each product Pi there are two generations G1 andG2 so there are several rule databases RG1 and RG2. First, complete sets of
patterns are generated based on the minimum support threshold to obtain an unbalanced dataset, as shown in Table 5. For each
product, the ratio of number of positive reviews to negative reviews was high. The “support” of positive reviews dataset should be
different from negative reviews dataset. The “support” should be adjusted to resolve the imbalance size of datasets.
As can be seen in Table 5, Apple_2 had the highest percentage of positive reviews (89.26%), more than for Apple_2 (87.34%). The
increase in positive reviews indicates improvement in the new generation of Apple iPad mini with a gain in consumer support.
For ASUS’s Google Nexus 7 Tablet, 78.46% of the reviews for Asus_2 were positive, a larger percentage than for Asus_1 (71.04%).
The increase in the number positive reviews for the Asus_2 indicates that consumers were satisfied with improvements made in 2013.
On the other hand, there was a decrease in the percentage of positive reviews for Samsung_2, from 84.51% for Samsung_1 to
83.94% for Samsung_2. More consumers showed a positive sentiment on Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 3 than on Galaxy Tab 4. In other
words, the changes to Samsung Galaxy Tab did not receive positive consumer reviews.
As with previous studies, aspects and their corresponding product attributes are defined by domain experts (see Table 6).

4.2. Building SWOT analysis report

4.2.1. SWOT analysis for a specific brand for different generations

When the change mining process discovers positive feedback in the reviews these can be called “Strength patterns”. It is worth
noting that association rules belonging to the Emerging Changes represent the aspects of a product that remain the same. This is an
opportunity for a business to track their weaknesses and strengths. In terms of changing modes, they do not need to know too much
redundant information beyond the minimum “support” threshold being higher to gain outstanding knowledge. We summarize the
number of patterns for the two generations G1 and G2. Knowledge of disappearing patterns can help managers to update their mar­
keting plans to address real conditions in the market.
It would be advantageous if more consumers like the properties of products in different generations. On the other hand, if the
reviews show mostly negative feedback is indicates consumer dissatisfaction with these products in different generations. The in­
formation can be integrated through the research model.
After summarizing all of the rules based on the corresponding grades and the products belonging to each generation we applied the
resultant rules sets to build a SWOT analysis map. Each item set is considered as a dimension in the map. The three SWOT analysis maps
illustrated and discussed as follows:

Table 4
Consumer reviews of products used in this study
Brand Product name Generation Number of positive Number of negative Total number of
reviews reviews reviews

Apple Apple iPad mini MD531LL/A (16GB, Wi-Fi, White / Silver) Apple_1 4704 590 5294
Apple iPad mini 2 with Retina Display ME279LL/A (16GB, Apple_2 2764 243 3007
Wi-Fi, White with Silver)
ASUS ASUS Google Nexus 7 Tablet (7-Inch, 32GB) 2012 Model Asus_1 1394 521 1915
Nexus 7 from Google (7-Inch, 32 GB, Black) by ASUS (2013) Asus_2 5177 1321 6498
Table
Samsung Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 (10.1-Inch, White) 2013 Mode Samsung_1 670 120 790
Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 (10.1-Inch 16GB, White) Samsung_2 2269 365 2634
Total 16978 3160 21366

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Table 5
Analysis of positive and negative reviews given to tablets.
Generation Positive Negative Total number of reviews Percentage of positive reviews Percentage of negative reviews

Apple_1 1635 237 1872 87.34% 12.66%

Apple_2 947 114 1061 89.26% 10.74%
Asus_1 780 318 1098 71.04% 28.96%
Asus_2 3279 900 4179 78.46% 21.54%
Samsung_1 300 55 355 84.51% 15.49%
Samsung_2 810 155 965 83.94% 16.06%
Total 11398 2707 14105 80.81% 19.19%

Table 6
Table showing feature words relating to tablet
Aspects Product attribute dictionary

App application, eBook, game, browser, software…

Design size, brightness, color, glass, image, screen, touchscreen…
Overall Pad, tablet, device
Hardware audio, button, Bluetooth, wireless, speaker…
Storage storage, memory, card, sd, capacity, memory…
Processor processor, run, speed, cpu, chip…
Network communication, connection, internet, network, bluetooth, wi-fi…
Weight weight, light, lightweight
UX (User experience) experience, operating, trouble, review…
Accessory accessory, keyboard, protector, cover…
CP(cost performance ratio) Cost, expense, money, price, value...
Service Repair, help, fix, FAQ, service, solution, support
Brand Brand
Battery battery, charger, power

(1) Apple_1 vs Apple_2:

The SWOT analysis map in Fig. 3 shows a comparison of the strength and weakness patterns for Apple_1 and Apple_2, the
earlier and later generations. The horizontal axis shows the number of positive and negative sentiments of each pattern for

Fig. 3. Strength and weakness patterns for Apple_1 and Apple_2

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generation G1 (i.e., Apple_1). The vertical axis represents the number of positive and negative sentiments of each pattern for
generation G2 (i.e., Apple_2).
▪ Upper-right quadrant: This quadrant shows the sets of aspects that continue to be viewed favorably between the two product
generations. (App, Display, Overall) and (UX, Display, Overall) are aspect sets that belong to emerging patterns. Since this
quadrant shows positive sentiment for both G1 and G2 generations, the aspect sets show that consumers are satisfied with the
Display and Overall for both generations. However, they favored a bit more on UX for G1 and App for G2. The size of a circle
represents the overall support value for that aspect set. Therefore, the aspect set (App, Display, Overall) is comparatively
bigger in its support value than the other aspect set.
▪ Upper-left quadrant: This quadrant shows those aspects that were unfavorable in G1, but were improved in G2. In this case,
the aspect set (Hardware, Overall) emerges as a strength because of the improvement of hardware over its previous gener­
ation. It is worth noting that aspects in the previous quadrant are the areas of strength that the company consistently deliver
between the generations, whereas aspects in this quadrant are those newly improved aspects. Both are considered by the
consumers as positive strengths.
▪ Lower-left quadrant: Weakness patterns indicate the same negative sentiment for both generations. Customers were still not
satisfied with (Battery), in both generations. As with items in the upper-right quadrant, these weaknesses are long-standing
weaknesses for more than one generation.
▪ Lower-right quadrant: Another issue demonstrated by the weakness patterns is dramatic changes from positive sentiment to
negative towards the new-generation product’s (Network, App). This indicates that the communication network of that new-
generation adds to the list of unfavorable weaknesses. Despite expressing satisfaction and giving positive comments for the
second generation of Apple products, consumers no longer express positive opinions of the cost-performance ratio (cp value)
of the newly designed new-generation product. The implication is that the changes in function and specifications of the new-
generation product did not justify the increased price.
(2) Asus_1 vs Asus_2
Figure 4 shows a comparison of opinions of Asus_1 and Asus_2. It can be seen in Emerging Patterns that (OS) and (Brand)
were consistently perceived negatively by consumers between the generations. For instance, many consumers felt the Android
system to be too slow even after updates, and this experience had a negative impact on overall comments.
(CP, Display, Overall) shows that consumers liked the attributes of Asus_1 and Asus_2 tablets including the cost-
performance ratio, display resolution, and overall dimensions. (Hardware, Display, Overall), (Accessory, Overall), (Stor­
age, Display, Overall) and (OS, Display, Overall) also indicate strength patterns.
Consumers’ satisfaction of service improved in G2 as shown by (Service, Overall) in the upper-left quadrant. In G2, Asus had
some improvements in several aspects, for example, increased display resolution; a more powerful quad-core CPU; decreasing
weight. However, there was an approximately 30 % decrease in the battery life.
(3) Samsung_1 vs Samsung_2

Fig. 4. Strong and weak opinions about Asus_1 and Asus_2

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The upper-right quadrant of in Fig. 5 shows that Samsung’s tablets enjoy sustaining strengths in apps, weight, display and brand
recognition. They continued to improve on display and app (upper-left quadrant), but were losing on service and UX going from G1 to
G2 (lower-right quadrant). Despite their effort to improve on display and app, there were still customers not overly satisfied (lower-left
quadrant).

4.2.2. Competitive superiority of brands from the same generation

In this section, we focus on examining the product categories for different brands from the same generation. Targeting products
from the same generation, the change mining rules can define external opportunities, when feedback for the target products is positive
while feedback for the competitors’ is negative. The association rules are the same and the difference in “support” between the two
rules is larger than the threshold. Greater consumer satisfaction with the target products is advantageous, providing an external
opportunity for manufacturers. However, when the target products receive negative feedback while the competitors receive positive
feedback, this is considered as indicative of an external threat.
We can see from Fig. 6 that User experience (UX) is the biggest opportunity for Apple products and a big weakness for Samsung.
Apple should thus make an effort to maintain this advantage in the future. The strength patterns for ASUS, as illustrated in Fig. 6,
including (CP, Display, Overall), (Hardware, Display, Overall), (Storage, Display, Overall), (OS, Display, Overall) and (Accessory,
Overall) indicate opportunities for Asus products. The results show that most aspects related to the design of the device including
hardware, storage, display resolution are acceptable, while the price is very appealing. The customers are satisfied with the cost
performance ratio. However, both brands have a big issue with “battery”.
In some ways, the results show that Samsung has the advantage because of its more advanced processor and weight compared to
ASUS and Apple. However, they should pay attention to the reasons why users are dissatisfied with their service. Their competitor,
ASUS received greater levels of satisfaction for accessory support, which could in turn, be an opportunity for ASUS. In terms of OS
system and Brand, ASUS fared worse than Samsung, especially receiving more negative opinions related to user experience (UX) and
App among the conditional rules, ultimately leading to a negative result. This indicates that ASUS should strengthen its hardware
functions.

5. Discussion

Consumer reviews are essential for retailers and product manufacturers to better understand general customer responses to their
products so that they can improve marketing campaigns and products accordingly. Traditional SWOT analysis is a popular tool to
identify future directions in four quadrants, namely Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. However, it suffers from four
key areas of shortcomings, including subjectivity in defining factors, lack of empirical validation, inflexible to meet the changing
environment, and lack of actionable steps. We proposed and empirically verified a change mining approach together with other
machine learning techniques to address the above issues of traditional SWOT analysis.

Fig. 5. Strong and weak opinions about Samsung_1 and Samsung_2

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Fig. 6. Competitive superiority of brands

After mining consumer opinions from social media data, we analyzed the advantages of the same series of products through
different product generations, enabling designers to understand the pros and cons of their design and assisting them to compensate for
the drawbacks of the products from the former generation when introducing new-generation products. From the perspective of user’s
reviews, we make a pro-and-con comparison showing the strengths and weaknesses of the target products.
The empirically validated SWOT framework can also shed some light on how consumers make purchase decisions with desirable
features appearing as “strength patterns” in comparison to the competitor’s weak patterns, for example Apple’s UX is a strength. From
the point-of-view of competition, product strengths become a competitive opportunity, whilst product weaknesses become a
competitive threat. This information provides an essential reference for enterprises affecting policymaking, product development, and
marketing.
Our study also shows that online retailers need not always fear negative reviews of their products. Customers should be encouraged
to provide as much depth, or detail, as possible in their comments for a search for good, although extremely negative reviews are less
helpful than moderate and positive reviews.

6. Implications and future work

In the present study, we demonstrated a holistic approach to perform automatic SWOT analysis using (a) traditional NLP data pre-
processing of the crawled data from Amazon.com, (b) aspect definitions, and feature mapping to extract aspect-sentiment pairs from
product reviews, (c) association analysis on these aspect-sentiment pairs, (d) change mining based on three innovative forms of change
in association rules between generations and across competition to identify each SWOT category. These steps are automatable and
customizable (e.g., feature to aspect mapping and threshold tuning) that extracts useful SWOT categories from empirical data. As a
result, it directly addresses the four main issues in the traditional SWOT analysis, namely subjectivity, lack of empirical validation,
inflexible to changes in environment, and lack of actional steps.

6.1. Theoretical implications

This study makes several theoretical contributions to the literature. First, we introduced a SWOT analysis framework which in­
tegrates aspect-based mining and change mining. Our approach improves over the traditional SWOT analysis by addressing the four
areas of shortcoming reviewed in the previous sections. As a result of our methodological improvement, the rationale of the original
SWOT analysis will continue to be viable and relevant, especially in a way that does not rely on the two-step approach (SWOT first and

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other quantification models next). Second, our approach allows for computerized automatic re-calibration of the framework in
response to the changing business environment. This automatic re-calibration also offers the following opportunities that are not
available or are difficult to come by in the traditional SWOT analysis or other recent improvements of SWOT with MCDM: (a) creation
or re-calibration of factors for SWOT analysis based on the desired period of time and frequency, (b) monitoring of trends and
competition, and (c) efficiency in re-calibration if previous results were captured in a re-usable format (e.g., serialized objects) or
distributed computing is employed. Third, improvement over the traditional approach for SWOT analysis by objectively capturing of
consumer’s voice as opposed to relying on subjective crafting of SWOT factors by the management. Such a subjectivity in the tradi­
tional approach causes inaccuracy in management planning, which compounds if a business is required to re-calibrate their SWOT
assessment multiple times due to the changing business environment. Fourth, prior studies have focused on competitive mining for the
same generation of products. However, this research proposes a method for the “analysis of the advantages of the same kind of
products in different generations”, aimed at assisting mangers to know just what the strengths of their product are in the eyes of
customers. Exploring the core advantages of the product is import for both the marketing and research teams.

6.2. Practical implications

Our work provides managerial implications for marketing 3C products and, more broadly, for other highly competitive and easily
replaced products. Given the necessity of capturing changing business environment, this study applies an association rule change
mining technique, which has been successfully adopted for the analysis of transaction data for the discovery of changes in customer
behaviors (Song et al., 2001).
We offer practical implications to companies wishing to maintain competitiveness and preserve their market position through the
analysis of UGC. Our study provides a framework for SWOT analysis from the perspective of social information. Potential customers
will often read reviews on social media to make comparisons while weighing the pros and cons of competing products, before choosing
those most suitable for themselves. In our approach, automation of factor extraction from UGC and timely monitoring of changes in the
extracted factors are possible, which allows businesses to address user concerns and proactively navigate through the changing
business environment.
Positive word of mouth can have a potential effect on other products of the same brand or on competitive products in the same
category. When a particular product is favored, it often indicates that consumers are less interested in other products from the same
category. In a competitive environment, a positive product strength can have a substantial weakening effect on other products in the
same category. Thus, our approach enables bridging current UGC to re-calibrate SWOT-based business strategies. For example, when
user concerns of product features in the market overall, a timely detection of such a business opportunity is possible through the
automation of our SWOT framework. This gives the business an edge over competitors. In a highly competitive industry, such an edge
could mean a sustainable stream of profits.
Businesses can make use of online information and big data by combining different types of content to explore competitive in­
telligence and should tailor their offerings based on behavioral analysis of consumer opinions. Our modified SWOT framework gives
businesses the tool that they are familiar with, but with added benefits to tap into UGC. It reduces the complexity inherently embedded
in the two-step approach (traditional SWOT first and quantitative models next), and offers a unique path to the traditional man­
agement tools without requiring the management to embark on complex mathematical analyses. This research also provides insights
for academic research into new ways to revitalize existing management tools with the capabilities of modern machine learning. A
creative use of our approach is to cross validate SWOT factors from UGC against company priorities to distill high priority factors with
the kind of validity from both consumers and corporate standpoints.
Our study is not without limitations. First, we only tested the proposed framework in a case study on some product reviews from
Amazon.com. In the future, we plan to conduct an empirical evaluation of the proposed model on a larger scale with other types of
product. Second, aspect-based mining is an unsupervised learning algorithm. There are some new topic modelling methods. However,
human labelling is very important for business analysis. It might be necessary to collect and use more data in future research to obtain
more generalized methods.
In the future, researchers, business analysts, and practitioners could adopt this framework for the analysis of social media to achieve
their objectives and to implement practical procedures for data collection, spam elimination, machine learning classification, senti­
ment analysis, feature categorization, and result visualization. While external analysis focuses on the environmental threats and
opportunities facing an organization, internal analysis can help an organization identify its organizational strengths and weaknesses.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Li-Chen Cheng: Conceptualization, Methodology, Validation, Data curation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing,
Funding acquisition. Kuanchin Chen: Writing – review & editing. Ming-Chu Lee: Software, Validation. Kua-Mai Li: Software,
Validation.

Acknowledgements

The authors are very grateful to the anonymous referees and Editor for their helpful comments and valuable suggestions for
improving the earlier version of the paper. This study was supported in part by the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan under
grants NSC 102-2410-H-031 -058 -MY3 and MOST 105-2410-H-031 -035 -MY3. MOST 108-2410-H-027-020

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