2nd International Conference on Advances in Science & Technology (ICAST-2019)
K. J. Somaiya Institute of Engineering & Information Technology, University of Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
COMM-AN
Opinion Mining of Customer Feedback
Delna Madan
K J Somaiya Institute of Engineering and
Information Technology, Sion, Mumbai
University of Mumbai
delna.madan@somaiya.edu
Harvi Shah
K J Somaiya Institute of Engineering and
Information Technology, Sion, Mumbai
University of Mumbai
harvi.shah@somaiya.edu
Abstract— Product reviews have now moved to the
online platforms, also the sheer amount of reviews since
the past few years has skyrocketed. It is impossible to read
and get the overall view of what the customer feels about a
product. The idea of this project is to take over this time-
consuming job of examining the data fetched and
unearthing the underlying meanings of the data. This will
be done by first gathering the data, cleaning/pre-
processing the data, clustering of data and finally
representing the yield in a diagrammatic/graphical format.
We aim to design this project for the creators, developers,
and producers not for the customers browsing through
site(s).
Keywords— Natural Language Processing(NLP),
Corpus, Opinion Mining, Sentiment Analysis, Topic
Modelling, Data Term Matrix.
I. INTRODUCTION
Nowadays to get a clear picture of what the user truly
feels about a product, is to sieve to the number of user
reviews and feedback. Having human personnel doing this
job is not only going to be very time consuming but also
an expensive endeavour, instead it will be wiser to have a
computer system do this menial job of going through
customer reviews and finding a general consensus.
We also need to take into account that not all the
received data(customer reviews and comments) to be real,
we can naturally assume it will contain some malicious
spam content as well. To tackle this,the system will follow
set rules to filter out such content to its best ability.
To understand customer feedback, we must first
understand the types of feedback most important to the
business in question. This normally, is best done by a
human in most cases, since they can understand the
underlying intent behind language, but in most cases
nowadays this is impossible since the number of feedbacks
a company/organization receives is too large for a person
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Mohan Jobanputra
K J Somaiya Institute of Engineering and
Information Technology, Sion, Mumbai
University of Mumbai
mohan.j@somaiya.edu
Sarita Rathod
K J Somaiya Institute of Engineering and
Information Technology, Sion, Mumbai
University of Mumbai
sarita.r@somaiya.edu
or even a group of people to do[1].
This menial work, can be instead left to a
machine/system to first differentiate fake reviews and
comments, and then filter them out, and lastly to sort the
reviews and comments according to what the user has
entered.
A general rule that you can apply to help you make
sense of customer feedback is to group it by:
1. Type(classifying into categories)
2. Theme(mentioned/asked/complained about)
3. Code(purpose of comments, in a concise manner)
After classifying all of the reviews and comments as
mentioned above, we can simply see which category,
theme, feature is the most popular. This information when
forwarded to the concerned organization is very useful
and will be used to decide any future actions[2].
II. LITERATURE SURVEY
In paper [1], The overall goals of this papers studied,
is to develop a common concept of data management to
make data meaningful, and to ensure maximum re-
usability and speed up the classification process these
benchmarking data are analyzed by the use of natural
language techniques (NLP).
In paper [2], the domain of IT benchmarking
collected data are often stored in natural language text
and therefore intrinsically unstructured . To ease data
analysis and data evaluations across different types of IT
benchmarking approaches a semantic representation of
this information is crucial. Thus, the identification of
conceptual (semantic) similarities is the first step in the
development of an integrative data management in the
domain of IT benchmarking.
This paper explains a part of the second phase of the
Document Classification phase of the proposed system.
In this we take the previously cleaned data from the
 2nd International Conference on Advances in Science & Technology (ICAST-2019)
K. J. Somaiya Institute of Engineering & Information Technology, University of Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
earlier phase, then POS tag the words in the article,
compare the words with of Opinion lexicon as well as
Opinion target ‘words’ stored in our database. Finding the
words we were looking for we prepare an appropriate
seed list containing the overall negative or positive score
our the particular article and then finally classify the
article under Positive, Neutral and Negative Opinionated
articles.
In paper [3], a system was proposed for feature
extraction and training the classifier to test whether the
article is Positive, Negative or Neutral and also to remove
irrelevant Ad content removal. This system proposed
would work in two modes, Online as well as Offline
mode. Along with this a Clarity scored is to be calculated
as well using the Divergence algorithm. For future
extraction purposes, the comments who are dependent on
independent on domain are separated. In feature extraction
NER tagger, Naive Bayes classifier and Porter Stemming
algorithms are used.
In paper [4], Probabilistic approach is used which is
based on Topic Modeling, its used in a more finely
grained opinion mining aspect is used. This system applies
the model to search aspects relating to various
segmentation of data which includes classifying various
age groups and other such attributes.
In paper [5], Different techniques and concepts are
mentioned, which are to be used in different
applications.Notably, it explains mining of the data and
the tools used in knowledge discovery from data(KDD).
Prior to explaining the process of data mining, in this
edition,we also learn about the methods for preprocessing,
processing and warehousing the data. Information about
data warehouses, online analytical processing(OLAP), and
data cube technology.
III. PROPOSED METHODOLOGY
The objective of the proposed system is to aid
organizations to achieve their goals by analyzing customer
feedback, the system is capable of acquiring, cleaning and
analyzing the knowledge automatically. Fig. 1 shows the
workflow of NLP used for this system, and it is explained
as below:
A. Start with a question: Ask the question, prior to
defining the data and build your process around
it
B. Collection of data: data is collected from various
sources to perform appropriate actions on it.
C. Data pre-processing: The collected data is pre-
processed i.e the unwanted data is removed.
D. Data cleaning: Data is cleaned and all the stop
words, words containing numbers, etc. is
cleaned and now we can make use of this data.
E. Perform EDA: It is a statistical method, used to
make sense of the data and how data can make
sense.
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Fig. 1 : 8 Step Workflow
F. Apply suitable techniques: We apply suitable
techniques, to develop methods and obtain
results that could be a linear regression.
G. Share insights: Showing the detailed graphical
report.
H. Review and update: Tweaking the above graph
to reach our intended goal
A. NLP techniques used in this system
● Sentiment analysis: This helps in determining the
emotional intent behind the feedback that a
customer gives,the activity of regulating the
psychological tone underneath the words. Also it
gives us an overview of the public opinion of a
product or topic.
● Topic modeling: This type of modelling involves
mathematical and statistical approach for
discovering the theoretical topics present in a
collection of document. With the help of these
models organizations can make better decisions
making. Unlike other approaches, it does not use
regular expressions or dictionary based keyword
searching techniques. It is an unsupervised
learning approach used to group related texts into
clusters according to their content(called
“topics”).
B. Technologies used to implement NLP
➔ Programming: Data - For data, we use pandas
package,as it open source and easier to use,it is
easier and flexible to use.It provides high level
manipulation of data and analyzing the data sets
using its robust data structures.
➔ Maths and statistics: for data cleaning, text
corpus is used, it is a large and structured set of
texts (nowadays usually electronically stored and
processed).The corpus semantic,is used for
verifying the occurrences or checking linguistic
rules in a clearly defined language territory.
➔ Communication: Effectively communicating data
is an important aspect of this process, this can be
broken down into the following parts :
 2nd International Conference on Advances in Science & Technology (ICAST-2019)
K. J. Somaiya Institute of Engineering & Information Technology, University of Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
◆ Data designing: Defining the data scope
and visualizing it along with extra
insights.
◆ Domain: defining the data according to
the expertise domain of the data.
NLTK, it is a toolkit that consists of
superior packages,it is used to make computers
understand the human language with the intent of
generating a response similar to humans.
After text corpus, we use document-term matrix
(DTM), It is basically a matrix, with documents
designated by rows and words by columns, that the
elements are the counts or the weights (usually by TF-
IDF). Subsequent analysis is usually based creatively on
DTM. We perform Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) on
DTM, EDA refers to the process of performing initial
investigations on data so as to discover patterns,
anomalies with the help of summary statistics and
graphical representations, it is all about making sense of
data in hand, before using it for the required purpose.
Following these steps, NLP techniques are applied as
mentioned above.
Following is the algorithm for implementation :
Data Pre-processing (Cleaning and Spell Checking) -
It is the major task in the text mining process, where
we filter lots of unwanted terms from the bag of
words(fetched data). For further analysis like pattern
finding it is preferred to treat each document as a bag of
words- as a set of all words with the frequency of the word
occurred in that document, also known as a corpus.
Here we have some cleaning methods to preprocessing
our corpus. Some documents have the implicit structure
terms like titles, sections, paragraphs etc. Step by step of
preprocessing task is as follows:
Step 1: Convert all upper case letters into lower case
letters example: “GAME” is converted into “game” here
all upper case letters are changed into lower case letters.
Step 2: In this step we remove the punctuation marks
like eg., . ? etc ) and replace with a single space character,
so as to not unintentionally merge words.
Step 3: Removing of stop words, here we remove the
stop words like “the, a, of etc” such types of words are
unused for text analysis. We can also remove some topic-
based common keywords from documents.
Step 4: The spell checking process is then used to find
words not existing in the dictionary and then finding a
suitable replacement for that word that is close enough to
the word not found. But for words that have no match are
left as is.
Step 5: Stemming process, one of the most important
task in pre-processing since it can transform words to
their roots.Example : removal of prefixes or postfixes of
words, such as -ING, -S, -TION, -ALY, -LY, -IOUS, -
IOUSLY, -ED, -EDLY, etc.
Step 6: After completion of the above 5 steps some
excess white spaces are generated such type of white
spaces are removed from documents.
Data Representation (Document-Term Matrix) -
A document-term matrix(DTM) or term-document
matrix(if transposed) is a matrix of the frequency of
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words or terms present in a collection of text. Here, the
words/terms represent to columns and their
frequency(number of occurrences) represent the rows. To
determine the value of each entry in the matrix, various
schemes are used. One such scheme is TF-IDF.
For instance, if one has the following two (short)
documents:
D1 = "I like databases" D2 = "I hate databases"
Then the document-term matrix would be:
Table 1 : Example Data Term Matrix
Table 1 shows which documents contain which terms
and how frequently they appear.
Using this DTM we can gain insight on the most
frequently occurring terms in the documents/collection of
documents. If the Data Cleaning step A is not done well,
then the DTM will contain useless or erroneous data, for
example including stop-words like ‘the’ or ‘a’ which are
used in regular sentences quite frequently will be
included in the most frequent words, giving us no useful
insight of the data. Another example of erroneous data
disrupting the useful data gained from a DTM is the
inclusion of incorrect words, if these words are not
corrected or removed they will either be counted as a
separate column or not joining with the column it as
supposed to be under, for example the word ‘good’
occurs 5 times, and the error word ‘goood’ occurs 1 time,
this word will make its own column instead of being
included the column of ‘good’.
Gaining and Displaying Insights -
Now that we have made the DTM for the documents,
we need to process it to gain some useful insights from it.
This can be achieved by implementing Word Cloud and
Sentiment Analysis among other techniques.
❏ Word Cloud - is a diagrammatic representation of
the frequency/importance of a word or term in a
document. In this step we need to simply apply
the wordcloud package in python, and using the
DTM to provide the frequency of said term. The
higher the frequency count of a word, the larger
the word in the word cloud. Output of this is in
Fig. 2.
❏ Sentiment Analysis - is used to determine the
polarity and subjectivity of document or set of
comments(in this case). Polarity is the value set
to each term which differentiates them into
degrees of positivity and negativity within a
range of (-1 to 1). Subjectivity is the value set
within the range of (-1 to 1), showing the degree
of the term being a fact and opinion. The overall
polarity and subjectivity values are the mean of
the polarity and subjectivity of each term in the
document. Eg. the word ‘good’ is set a polarity
value of 0.7 and subjectivity value of 0.6,
 2nd International Conference on Advances in Science & Technology (ICAST-2019)
K. J. Somaiya Institute of Engineering & Information Technology, University of Mumbai, Maharashtra, India

whereas the string “very good” has the polarity

values of 0.9 and the subjectivity value of 0.78.
Output of this is in Fig.3.
Document Clustering Methods -
Partition Around Medoids (PAM)[4]: Method Both
the k-means and PAM algorithms are partitions (breaking
the data-set up into groups). K-medoids chooses data
points as centers of clusters. It can also be used as a
partitioning technique, that clusters the data sets of ‘n’
documents into ‘k’ clusters with ‘k’ known Fig. 3 : Sample Sentiment Analysis Chart
medoids(centers for each cluster).
In Fig. 3 above, we see the sentiment analysis of
PAM algorithm[4]: Input: DocumentSet= {d1,d2,…,dn} comments- depicted in a graphical format(scatter plot).
of size ‘n’, Set of documents as Corpus. Shows the value of each comment in polarity and
Steps: subjectivity domains. we see a scatter plot chart. Each
➢ Initialize: Select ‘k’(centers) of the ‘n’ total data point in the graph represents a single comment from a user.
points as the medoids. The position of the point is defined by the comment’s
polarity(value from -1 to +1) as the x-coordinate and the
➢ Group up each data point, to its closest ‘k’ medoid.
subjectivity(value from -1 to +1) as the y-coordinate.
➢ Loop while the Cost of the configuration decreases:
○ Loop for every medoid ‘m’ and for every
non-medoid data point ‘o’:
■ Exchange ‘m’ and ‘o’, and
recalculate the sum of distances of
points to their respective medoid.
This is used to find a better, more
suitable center of a cluster, among
the points present in the cluster.
■ If the absolute Cost of the
configuration increments due to the
changes made in the previous
step(i), undo the swap between ‘m’
and ‘o’.
Output: ‘k’ number of clusters from Text Documents.
Shown in Fig. 4.
IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS
This system has a number of outputs, from which we can
infer the underlying intent of the customers when they post
a review for a product.
Fig 4 : Sample Topic Modeling Graph
In Fig. 2, we can see the frequently occurring
The Fig. 4 shows topic modeling - depicted in
words - depicted in the Word cloud format. The commonly
graphical format (pie chart). It shows the overall topic
used words across comments are listed here. To make this
mentioned by customers. the pie chart of the multiple
more efficient and meaningful we must first remove topics of all the comments for a particular product.
common words relating to the product being reviewed. The
higher the frequency count of a word, the larger the word
in the word cloud.

Fig. 2 : Sample Product Word Cloud

Fig. 5 : Spam Detection Pie Chart
In Fig. 5 we can see spam collection - depicted in

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 2nd International Conference on Advances in Science & Technology (ICAST-2019)
K. J. Somaiya Institute of Engineering & Information Technology, University of Mumbai, Maharashtra, India

graphical format (pie chart). Shows the number of spam-like
comments from the total number of comments. This is
determined by applying a weighted dictionary filled with
spam words with their weights(how often that word is used
in spam).
V. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE SCOPE
Reviewing product comments and feedback will help
the users(producers, creators, and developers) to better
understand how their product audience feels on an
average about their product(s). Using NLP we can read
through innumerable amounts of comments posted by
customers and through cleaning, filtering and processing
them, we can get an output that is concise and
understandable format. In the future, we could add more
complex and accurate topic modeling algorithms, along
with implementing real-time analysis of the comments
submitted by users.
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