Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 58 (2023) 101250

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Electronic Commerce Research and Applications

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

Categorizing affective response of customer with novel explainable

clustering algorithm: The case study of Amazon reviews
Wonjoon Kim a, 1, Keonwoo Nam b, c, 1, Youngdoo Son b, c, *
a
Division of Future Convergence (HCI Science Major), Dongduk Women’s University 60 Hwarang-ro 13-gil, Seongbuk-gu, Seoul 02748, South Korea
b
Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Dongguk University - Seoul, 30 Pildong-Ro 1-Gil, Jung-Gu, Seoul 04620, South Korea
c
Data Science Laboratory (DSLAB), Dongguk University - Seoul, 30 Pildong-Ro 1-Gil, Jung-Gu, Seoul 04620, South Korea

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

Keywords: Electronic word of mouth (e-WOM) influences consumer decision-making. Since consumers’ affective experi­
Attention mechanism ences for products are vast, research is needed to understand and categorize them accurately. In this paper, we
Explainable artificial intelligence developed a deep learning-based clustering algorithm for categorizing consumer sentiment in product reviews
Sentiment analysis
and explored the applicability of this algorithm. A Deep Attentive Self-Organizing Map (DASOM) was created by
Electronic word of mouth
noting individualized sentimental characteristics of each review and interpreting why each review was included
in a particular cluster. As a result of analyzing 4941 reviews of Amazon, one of online commerce platforms, it
was confirmed that sentiment classification through DASOM could be effectively used to categorize implicit
affective experiences of consumers. DASOM was effective in identifying the relationship between multi-
dimensional affective elements that were difficult to derive from TF-IDF. Using the proposed methodology, it
is expected to provide practical information for companies that design products considering consumer affection.

1. Introduction
Word of mouth (WOM) refers to personal communication between
individuals concerning their perception of goods and services (Ye et al.,
2009). WOM has traditionally been used by consumers to learn about
products and services and evaluate their attributes prior to purchase
(Shaheen et al., 2019; Mishra et al., 2021). Since the emergence of e-
business, research has consistently shown that online or electronic word-
of-mouth (e-WOM) plays an even more important role than traditional
WOM in shaping consumer attitudes and behaviors (Litvin et al., 2008;
Cheung & Thadani, 2012; Zhao et al., 2020). In addition, since e-WOM is
provided in various forms on e-commerce, social media, blogging sites,
and video platforms such as YouTube, a vast amount of content can
spread faster than WOM.
Since e-WOM, which is propagated through unspecified masses for a
specific product, contains general emotional information related to the
product, it can be used to recognize consumers’ needs (Gregoriades &
Pampaka, 2020). The representative form of e-WOM can be divided into
reviews written in verbal expression and ratings for products/services.
Although a star rating makes it easy and intuitive to determine the
reputation or quality of a product, it has some problems (Al-Natour and
Turetken, 2020; Liu & Chen, 2022). The most representative problem is
the bias of a star rating. The inconsistency between a star rating and a
review is one of frequently mentioned issues. For example, one may
encounter a high star rating with a review having negative contents. One
may also encounter a low star rating for a review with favorable con­
tents. In addition, it is difficult to know the underlying criterion for the
evaluation or various opinions made by customers about the product
based on the star rating alone. Finally, while e-commerce platforms such
as Amazon and eBay allow users to rate a product they purchase, plat­
forms such as social media do not provide a rating service.
To address these problems, many attempts have been made to un­
derstand the implicit needs and actual feelings of customers in text re­
views (Heinonen & Medberg, 2018; Puschmann & Powell, 2018; Jeong
et al., 2019; Valdivia et al., 2019). Basically, the method of analyzing
sentiment in e-WOM is a lexicon-based approach (Lee et al., 2021),
which builds the meaning of words in the document as a dictionary and
scores those words based on the constructed dictionary to judge senti­
ment. Lexicon-based sentiment analysis has a disadvantage in that it
requires a lot of effort to build a sentiment dictionary because the per­
formance is highly dependent on lexical resources such as sentiment
dictionaries. To overcome this shortcoming, studies using machine

* Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: wjkim@dongduk.ac.kr (W. Kim), namkw@dgu.ac.kr (K. Nam), youngdoo@dongguk.edu (Y. Son).
1
These authors equally contributed to this work.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.elerap.2023.101250
Received 3 May 2022; Received in revised form 30 January 2023; Accepted 28 February 2023
Available online 5 March 2023
1567-4223/© 2023 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
W. Kim et al.
learning techniques such as artificial neural networks (ANN), support
vector machine (SVM), Naive Bayes, relevance vector machine, and so
on have been attempted (Son & Lee, 2016). Recently, hybrid-based
research combining these two methods to improve classification per­
formance has been actively conducted (Gupta and Joshi, 2020; Yang
et al., 2020a; Yang et al., 2020b).
Sentiments in most previous studies are categorized by defining af­
fective factors such as positive/negative in advance. In such case, human
intervention is required for labeling of sentiments. In addition, there is a
limitation in clustering all documents into limited affective elements
(Ma et al., 2017). Since users express characteristics of the same product
in various ways, a vast and complex lexicon can appear in e-WOM
(Pessutto et al., 2020). Therefore, clustering is more appropriate than
classifying a specific affective experience into several categories.
Document clustering is a text mining technique that aims to recog­
nize patterns among documents and obtain information by dividing
them into groups based on contents. It has been actively used for
sentiment analysis of text data (Li & Liu, 2012; Wang et al., 2018; Zhang
et al., 2021). Document clustering in sentiment analysis aims to derive
meaningful sentiment information from clustering results after applying
an algorithm such as k-means & hierarchical clustering, self-organizing
map (SOM), and so on to the document data vector (Jain & Nandanwar,
2014). Among them, SOM, which expresses high-dimensional data in a
low-dimensional grid through dimensionality reduction and clustering
to understand the patterns implied by the data, has been widely used in
recent years (Son & Kim, 2023). However, sentiment analysis using
these document clustering methods has shown poor performance
because it is usually performed in a fixed input space of features based
on word counting.
Therefore, researchers have proposed deep clustering methods to
improve performance (Kim et al., 2020; Bai et al., 2021). However, since
these methods clusters embedded vectors of a document, focusing only
on clustering results, they cannot explain the clustering results or major
sentiment factors existing in individual documents. To avoid the prob­
lem in which the reliability of consumer sentiment information is low­
ered according to the results of clustering, it is necessary to explain the
process or reason for the clustering of documents.
Therefore, there is a need to develop an interpretable algorithm
model to explain how each document responds sensitively to which
emotional factors in the document clustering process form a cluster (Wu
et al., 2020). An attention mechanism is utilized for interpretable
learning algorithms (Bahdanau et al., 2014; Lee et al., 2023). This
concept was proposed for the first time in machine translation. It
quantifies the degree to which a word is translated into new language
attention to words in an existing language. Learning is performed while
the output sequence includes the context of the input sequence. Due to
these characteristics, it has been applied to various deep learning algo­
rithms such as machine translation, showing performance improvement
(Lin et al., 2017; Kiela et al., 2018).
The primary goal of this study was to propose and verify an inter­
pretable clustering method for affective experiences of online word of
mouth using the feedforward attention mechanism. In this study, Deep
Attentive Self-Organizing Map (DASOM), an interpretable clustering
algorithm, was proposed to solve the black box issue of the existing deep
learning-based clustering method. It combines the feed-forward atten­
tion mechanism with SOM to provide representations suitable for clus­
tering and interpretability. The denoising autoencoder is also employed
to find more robust representations. For verification, we employed
product reviews from Amazon, one of the online commerce platforms.
An experiment confirmed that the proposed algorithm could cluster
affective experiences for specific products. Furthermore, DASOM was
also able to grasp the influence of words in clustering affective experi­
ences of product reviews and derive affective elements related to
product design features based on context vector values of affective vo­
cabularies for each cluster.
The main contributions of this paper can be summarized as follows:
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Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 58 (2023) 101250
• A novel interpretable deep learning-based clustering algorithm, Deep
Attentive Self-Organizing Map (DASOM), is proposed by adopting
the feed-forward attention to SOM.
• Attention mechanism makes DASOM able to interpret the results of
sentiment categorization in user reviews as well as to find the rep­
resentations suitable for clustering.
• When applying to the online reviews of recliners, DASOM can derive
affective experiences such as ’soft’ and ’large’, which were not
revealed in the existing clustering method SOM so that it can be used
for improving affective quality and product development by inter­
preting the relationship between representative factors for products.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 pro­
vides a theoretical background of this study and concisely reviews pre­
vious studies on sentiment analysis, deep clustering, and explainable
artificial intelligence (XAI) to describe gaps in our study. Section 3 ex­
plains the proposed model and its components. Sections 4 and 5 then
describe the methodology used in the study and show results derived
from the model. Finally, discussion of the results, limitations, and future
research of this study with concluding remarks are provided.
2. Related work
2.1. Sentiment analysis using document clustering
Affective experiences related to specific products and services are
multidimensionally embedded in text data such as reviews, or social
networking services (SNS) mainly written by users (Kim et al., 2019;
Choo and Kim, 2023). Document clustering generally uses
high-dimensional text data as input data after vectorization or embed­
ding to form a meaningful cluster. Since customers express character­
istics of the same product in various ways, vast and complex affective
lexicons are bound to appear redundantly. Various research studies are
actively conducted in this field to acquire affective information of cus­
tomers through document clustering (Ma et al., 2017; Wu et al., 2020;
Abbasi-Moud et al., 2021).
In general, sentiment analysis using document clustering is focused
on classifying polarity, aspect, and sentiment score by performing
feature extraction of documents using natural language processing
(NLP) technology and calculating similarity between documents. Ran­
domized clustering cuckoo search (RCCS) method that classifies docu­
ments into three clusters (positive, neutral, negative) through
Levenshtein distance and Cosine similarity (Ahmed et al., 2020), clus­
tering based on sentiment score through similarity graph (Abbasi-Moud
et al., 2021), polarity sentiment analysis using TF-IDF and k-means,
sentiment analysis using unigram, TF-IDF based hierarchical clustering,
and sentiment aspect cluster extraction using multilingual word em­
beddings are representative studies.
There is a problem when applying existing methods focusing on
classifying predefined or limited types of affective elements in a recent
situation where multi-dimensional and interrelated information is
generated and expanded from media of various platforms. To solve these
problems, various research studies have been performed to classify
multidimensional emotional information in documents using deep
learning methods. Attempts have been made to propose an explainable
model to solve the black box issue, one of the most representative issues
for deep learning (Pessutto et al., 2020).
Ito et al. (2020) have analyzed the prediction process of sentiment
polarity score through Contextual Sentiment Neural Network (CSNN)
using initialization propagation. Nguyen et al. (2021) have investigated
the importance of variables in predicting LSTM and ensemble models for
binary polarity classification using SHAP values. However, when per­
forming sentiment analysis using document clustering, no study has
directly interpreted the affective vocabulary that affects the formation
process of each cluster or suggested why the affective vocabulary is
included in the corresponding cluster.
W. Kim et al.
2.2. Deep clustering
When existing clustering method is applied to multidimensional
data, the similarity between data is likely to become meaningless,
making the clustering ineffective (Forest et al., 2019). To solve this
problem, a deep clustering method has emerged. Deep clustering refers
to a clustering method using deep learning techniques. It generally uses
a joint learning method of cluster learning and representation learning
of input data (Hershey et al., 2016). In deep clustering, the represen­
tation of input data is learned in a form that is easy for clustering by
combining the reconstruction process of the autoencoder in the first half
of the clustering algorithm (Min et al., 2018). Deep clustering has
evolved mainly into three categories of architecture since its first
description by Hershey et al. (2016) to learned embedding values of a
spectral clustering process by optimizing the affinity matrix between
input data. The first category is an autoencoder-based method that is
most used as a deep clustering model (Xie et al., 2016; Chazan et al.,
2019; Diallo et al., 2021; Cai et al., 2022). This method can reduce the
dimension of input data using an encoder. The nonlinear relationship
between variables is then learned through a reconstruction process to
obtain a feasible feature space for clustering. The second category is a
feedforward neural network-based method (Yang et al., 2016a; Yang
et al., 2016b; Caron et al., 2018; Wang et al., 2021). This method is
characterized by performing representation learning of input data more
robustly and quickly using a deep neural network that has pre-trained
classification or clustering tasks for large-scale datasets (image, text,
etc.). Due to this characteristic, models in this category are dominated
by convolutional neural network (CNN) based architectures that can
learn robust representations for large datasets. The third category is a
deep generative model-based method (Jiang et al., 2016; Lim et al.,
2020; Yang et al., 2020a; Yang et al., 2020b). This method performs
clustering tasks and generates new sample data from obtained clusters.
For data generation, it utilizes generative neural networks such as
generative adversarial networks (GAN) (Goodfellow et al., 2014) and
variational autoencoder (VAE) (Kingma & Welling, 2013).
2.3. Explainable artificial intelligence based on attention mechanism
The attention mechanism (Bahdanau et al., 2014) refers to a method
that uses a vector to reflect the degree to which a specific output vector
pays attention to all input vectors as a weight. This mechanism was first
proposed to solve the problem that a fixed-length context vector could
not contain sufficient information as the length of the sentence input to
RNNs (Recurrent Neural Networks)-based encoder-decoder model
increased in the machine translation task. This study solved the problem
by using the attention weight, which quantified how a specific word in
the output language paid attention to the input word in context as a
context vector. When the attention mechanism is applied to a deep
neural network model, it is known that interpretation of the working
principle inside the model is possible because the model can calculate
the degree of attention to each token when performing a specific task
(Chaudhari et al., 2021).
As the attention mechanism shows good performance in NLP,
attention mechanism is widely used in various fields that utilize deep
neural networks, such as document classification (Yang et al., 2016a;
Yang et al., 2016b; Lin et al., 2017; Kiela et al., 2018), speech recogni­
tion (Chorowski et al., 2015; Chan et al., 2016), image captioning (Xu
et al., 2015), and recommendation systems (Ying et al., 2018). The
attention mechanism has been modified into several forms according to
the characteristics of the application target. Representatively, self-
attention (Yang et al., 2016a; Yang et al., 2016b), which calculates the
degree of attention and relationship between word tokens in sentences,
multi-head attention, which connects self-attention in parallel (Vaswani
et al., 2017), and feed-forward attention (Raffel & Ellis, 2015), which
continuously calculates weight values assigned to each input variable
through a separate feed-forward neural network in the learning process
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Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 58 (2023) 101250
of deep neural networks, have been reported.
Many studies are being conducted to interpret predictive models
through various attention mechanisms. Yang et al. (2016a), Yang et al.
(2016b) have successfully analyzed a document classification model by
extracting relatively active sentences and words from the document
classification task through self-attention stacked in two layers. Baan
et al. (2019) have conducted a study showing that multi-head attention
can partially interpret the process of document summarization. Tian
et al. (2020) have proposed a method to automatically analyze the
Chinese word separation and part-of-speech (POS) tagging process
through two feed-forward attention models.
3. Proposed clustering model
This section describes our proposed model, Deep Attention Clus­
tering Self-Organizing Map (DASOM), including SOM, feedforward
attention mechanism, and denoising autoencoder as preliminaries.
3.1. Self-Organizing map (SOM)
SOM is a type of clustering method that forms high-dimensional data
in the form of a map by mapping and sorting them into low-dimensional
nodes (See Fig. 1). Each node has its own node embedding vector (Aij )
and an index value (i,j) on the map, and each input vector is mapped to
the best matching unit (BMU) having the most similar node embedding
vector. Finally, nodes form some clusters on a low-dimensional map
through the entire node update. The map has the characteristic of pre­
serving the positional relationship of the input variable as it is and re­
flects the semantic relationship between the each of input vectors’
internal representations (Kohonen, 1990). SOM proceeds through the
following steps:
Step 1. Entire node initialization: Initialize (i, j),.Aij
Step 2. BMU mapping and update: Calculate the node embedding
vector closest to the first input vector (X1 ) and update the corre­
sponding node (BMU) by the difference.
BMU = argminij ‖X1 − Aij ‖2 (1)
ABMU ←ABMU + ‖X1 − ABMU ‖ (2)
Step 3. Remaining node update: Update by reflecting a neighborhood
function (N ) together for preserving positional relationships in raw
input space.
⃦ ⃦
Aij\BMU ←Aij\BMU + N ⃦X1 − Aij\BMU ⃦ (3)
Step 4. Repeat step 2–4 until the last input vector (Xn ).
SOM has been used for review text analysis because of its visuali­
zation ability of nodes where the text-embedded vectors are mapped, e.
g., the vectors generated from the TF-IDF algorithm. However, because
SOM uses the embedded representation vectors without any processing,
it may have difficulty finding good clustering for the texts with highly
different word distributions. In other words, it may generate some
clusters with few instances or outliers, which induces meaningless
clustering. These phenomena can become more severe in text analysis
with highly sparse embeddings.
Therefore, the DASOM proposed in this study tried to find the
attention vector for each instance to obtain more suitable representa­
tions for clustering. In addition, these attention values are provided for
each element in a representation vector so that it can be easily
interpreted.
W. Kim et al.
Fig. 1. Principle of clustering of Self-Organizing Map.
3.2. Feedforward attention mechanism
Fig. 2 shows a feedforward attention mechanism with a feedforward
network, fθ, which takes an n-dimensional vector × as an input and
generates an attention vector α representing each element’s importance
weight in x. After α and × are combined, they are then transmitted to
another deep neural network, gϕ, which conducts the target task. Thus,
the feed-forward attention mechanism has a structure that a feed-
forward neural network for finding attention values, fθ, is added to the
first part of a network for the target task.
In details, the feedforward attention mechanism works as follows.
When an input × is given, the attention vector α is calculated as a
feedforward network fθ(x). The sum of the elements in α is normalized
by adding a soft-max layer at the end of fθ. A context vector c is calcu­
lated by conducting elementwise multiplication of α and x. It is then
used as an input of the network for a target task, gϕ. Both networks are
trained simultaneously so that elements in α can represent how much the
model focuses on each variable to perform a target task.
In this study, we focused on two features of the feed-forward atten­
tion mechanism. Each input variable has its attention weight, and each
instance has its attention vector. Therefore, the feedforward attention
mechanism can provide how each variable in each sample affects the
trained model. We proposed an interpretable clustering algorithm based
on this property by applying the feedforward attention mechanism to
deep clustering. TF-IDF vectors of text documents were used as input
instances so that the effect of each word in the document on clustering
results could be presented.
3.3. Denoising autoencoder
A denoising autoencoder was first proposed by Vincent et al. (2008).
Fig. 2. Illustrative of feed-forward attention mechanism.
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Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 58 (2023) 101250
It is a variant of an autoencoder, taking an input corrupted with noise
and reconstructing a clean one. It is known that a denoising autoencoder
can learn a more robust representation of an input instance (Vincent
et al., 2010; Tschannen et al., 2018; Shen et al., 2020). In particular,
when using real-world data, there are many cases where the data is noisy
or unrefined, so a denoising autoencoder is used in various fields, such as
locomotion activities, image classification/segmentation, signal detec­
tion, and recommendation system (Gu et al., 2018; Roy et al., 2018; Yu
et al., 2018; Chiang et al., 2019; Zhang et al. 2019).
Fig. 3 shows a brief structure of a denoising autoencoder. An
instance × is corrupted with noise. The corrupted input ×̃becomes an
input of an autoencoder which is trained to minimize the difference
between a clean instance × and the reconstructed input x’ so that it
reconstructs the clean instance from the corrupted one. A typical choice
of noise is Gaussian or masking noise. As mentioned above, the
denoising autoencoder can learn a robust representation, z, due to
noise’s enlarged manifold of inputs. Thus, we adopted the denoising
autoencoder to find a robust representation of high-dimensional review
data. Other deep clustering algorithms (Xie et al., 2016; Guo et al., 2018;
Forest et al., 2019) usually employ a conventional autoencoder.
3.4. DASOM: Deep Attentive Self-Organizing map
This study proposed a novel interpretable deep clustering algorithm
called Deep Attentive Self-Organizing Map (DASOM) by combining a
feedforward attention mechanism and a deep self-organizing map to
analyze customer sentiments from review texts. As shown in Fig. 4,
Fig. 3. General structure of denoising autoencoder.
W. Kim et al. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 58 (2023) 101250

DASOM consists of two parts: (1) a denoising autoencoder with a feed­ nodes on the map constructed by SOM as in Forest et al. (2019), where
forward attention mechanism and (2) a self-organizing map (SOM) of d(⋅, ⋅) was the distance between two node embeddings and T was the
the context vector, the input vector of which its attention score weights temperature parameter for controlling the bandwidth of the Gaussian
each element. First, the proposed method trains a denoising autoencoder function. The clustering loss with SOM can be written as follows:
after adding Gaussian noises to input instances. The penultimate layer of ∑I− 1 ∑J− 1 ⃒⃒ ⃒⃒2
the encoder part, a preceding layer of the innermost layer, was designed Lclu = i=0 j=0
N T (d(χ (z), ij) )⃒⃒z − mij ⃒⃒2 (5)
to have the same dimension of input to play the role of an attention
With the loss function in Eq. (5), embeddings of BMU and nearby
vector. A context vector was then calculated as the element-wise product
nodes are rapidly trained to be closer to the input, whilst nodes distant
of the original input vector and the corresponding attention vector. It
from an input are less affected. It is also noteworthy that the clustering
was used as an input of a self-organizing map that formed clusters of ∑ ∑ ⃒⃒ ⃒⃒2
those context vectors. The denoising autoencoder and the self- loss in Eq. (5) is converged to a k-means loss, I− 1 J− 1 ⃒⃒z − mχ(z) ⃒⃒ , if
i=0 j=0 2
organizing map were jointly trained. Thus, high weights were auto­ the temperature decreases to zero during training.
matically given to features of each input, highly affecting the clustering Finally, the total loss function is defined a weighted sum of two loss
result. The clustering result of each input then became explainable with functions, Lrec and Lclu , as follows:
attention scores of features.
Ltot = Lclu + γLrec (6)
Detailed procedures are as follows. An input vector, x ∈ Rd , is given
as a TF-IDF vector composed of d sentimental words. With a corrupted where γ is a weight parameter that controls the trade-off between two
input, ̃x = Gaussian Noise(x), and a reconstructed input, x = gϕ (fθ (̃ losses. The proposed DASOM model can be trained with the total loss
′
x)),
where fθ and gϕ denote the encoder and the decoder, respectively, the function in Eq. (6) by an end-to-end learning scheme. The overall al­
reconstruction loss of a denoising autoencoder can be defined as follows: gorithm of the proposed method is presented in [Algorithm 1].

(1)
′
Lrec = ||x − x ||22
Algorithm 1. Deep Attentive Self-Organizing Map (DASOM)
In addition, from the penultimate layer of the encoder part of the Given a dataset D = {x1 , x2 , ⋯, xN },
an encoder fθ and a decoder gϕ ,
denoising autoencoder, the attention vector α ∈ Rd and the context a network from input layer to penultimate layer of the encoder fθ\e ,
vector z ∈ Rd are calculated as follows: variance of Gaussian noise σ2 ,
the number of rows and columns of two-dimensional SOM (I, J),
α = softmax(fθ\e (̃x)) (2) the temperature of Gaussian neighbouring function T,
and the weight between two loss functions γ
z=α⊙x (3)
1: Repeat
2: for all xn ∈ D
where fθ\e (⋅) denotes the network from the input layer to the penultimate 3: xn = N (xn , σ2 I)
Sample a corrupted input ̃
( ( ))
and ⊙ denotes the elementwise multiplication of two vectors. 4:
Find a reconstruction loss Lrec = ||x − x ||22 where xn = gϕ fθ ̃
′ ′
xn
These context vectors are clustered by two-dimensional SOM with I ( )
5: Calculate an attention vector αn = softmax fθ\e (xn ) and a context vector zn =
rows and J columns. First, the best matching unit (BMU) of an input z,
αn ⊙ xn
χ (z), is defined as follows: 6: Find BMU of the context vector χ (zn ) = argminij ‖zn − mij ‖2
⃒⃒ ⃒⃒2 7: ∑ ∑ 1 T ⃒⃒ ⃒⃒2
χ (z) = argmini,j ⃒⃒z − mij ⃒⃒2 (4) Calculate a clustering loss Lclu = I−i=01 J−
j=0 N (d(χ (zn ), ij) ) zn − mij 2
⃒⃒ ⃒⃒
{ }
8: Update all parameters θ, ϕ, mij 0≤i≤I− 1,0≤j≤J− 1 with respect to Ltot = Lclu +
where mij is the embedding of ij-th node of SOM, 0 ≤ i ≤ I − 1 and γLrec
9: endfor
0 ≤ j ≤ J − 1. We employed Gaussian neighboring function,
10: Until converged.
d(⋅,⋅)2
N T (d(⋅, ⋅) ) = e− T2 , to define the topographic distance between two

Fig. 4. Overall structure of proposed algorithm (DASOM).

5
W. Kim et al.
According to Besson (2016), training a SOM has the computational
( )
complexity of O(nη dS +qS2 ) where n is the number of training sam­
ples, η is the maximal number of training epochs, d is the dimension of
an input vector, q is the dimension of an embedded vector for the SOM,
and S = I*J is the number of nodes in the SOM.
Our method is an extension of SOM with some additional trainable
network parameters. Since the computational complexity of training a
neural network with the number of weights, w, is O(nηw) (Zhu et al.,
2018), the complexity of training the proposed method can be summa­
( (
rized as O nη dS + qS2 + w
))
where w is the number of additional
weight parameters in the denoising autoencoder. The computational
complexity of adding Gaussian noise can be omitted because it is pro­
portional to nηd. It is noteworthy that DASOM requires additional
computation, which is proportional to w, compared to SOM to obtain the
attention scores. Hence, the additional computation can be controlled by
adjusting the size of the denoising autoencoder.
4. Methods
4.1. Experimental dataset and data Pre-Processing
Customer review data registered by product consumers online
contain information on the user’s emotional experience represented by
product quality, price, design, and aesthetic satisfaction (Hennig-Thurau
et al., 2004). In this study, recliner product review data from Amazon.
com, one of the largest online e-commerce sites in the world, were
collected. The recliner is furniture that includes various emotional ele­
ments for users depending on the material and the product size (Kim
et al., 2019).
In this study, each review document was TF-IDF vectorized through
the data pre-processing process described by Kim et al. (2019). The data
pre-processing process was as follows. First, we obtained review data
and metadata on the Amazon website for the recliner through web
parsing. After tokenizing linguistic units such as words and documents,
meaningless stop words in the documents were removed. In addition,
POS tagging was performed to assign parts of speech, such as nouns and
adjectives, to each word constituting the document. The primary form
containing the word’s meaning was obtained by extracting the stem and
headword. Finally, a Document-Term Matrix was calculated based on
each document’s frequency of words with emotional meaning. A
component of the document-word matrix consists of the product of the
term frequency (TF) in the document and the inverse document fre­
quency (IDF) of the word frequency among documents. As a result, we
calculated a Document-Term Matrix consisting of 4,941 review data and
46 affective vocabularies for Amazon’s recliner products.
4.2. Experimental design (procedure)
In this study, hyperparameter values were experimentally set
considering the number and dimensions of review data. First, the
reconstruction loss function of the denoising autoencoder and the clus­
tering loss function of the self-organizing map were combined at a ratio
of 1.5:1. The denoising autoencoder was pre-trained with 30 epochs
after setting the standard deviation σ of Gaussian noise to be 0.5. The
dimension of the self-organizing map was determined to be (8, 8), and T
representing the radius of the Gaussian neighbor function, was set to
exponentially decrease from a maximum of 10 to a minimum of 0.01. In
addition, learning the entire DASOM algorithm was carried out by
setting the training epoch to 3,000 and the batch size to 256. The
structure of the DASOM model used in the experiment is shown in Fig. 5
below.
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Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 58 (2023) 101250
5. Results
5.1. Results of sentiment clustering by DASOM
Results of sentiment clustering for customer reviews using DASOM
are shown in Fig. 6. Numbers from 0 to 56 displayed inside the nodes
were index numbers sequentially assigned to each node. Corresponding
nodes were BMU nodes to which one or more reviews were assigned.
The seven nodes not marked with a number were nodes to which no
review data were assigned. In the color map, the inner color of each node
reflected the average distance from neighboring nodes. The closer the
distance between nodes, the lighter the color. On the other hand, the
border color of each node was a criterion for categorizing clusters.
Agglomerative hierarchical clustering was used to set criteria for
generating clusters of nodes derived from DASOM. Clusters were
recognized by considering each node embedding vector as a cluster and
merging clusters based on their similarity (Vesanto and Alhoniemi,
2000; Hormann & Fischer, 2019). In this study, clusters were identified
by dividing the dendrogram derived through agglomerative hierarchical
clustering using a static threshold. Clusters were then merged at a level
where the distance between clusters was less than 0.002 based on Ward
Linkage. As can be seen in Fig. 7, the total number of clusters was 10,
with cluster 9 having the most reviews and cluster 6 having the fewest
reviews.
5.2. Comparison of TF-IDF and context vector for affective vocabulary
For a total of ten clusters, results of extracting the five most affective
vocabularies with the highest values of TF-IDF and context vector for
each cluster are shown in Table 1 below. The ratio of the affective vo­
cabulary to total reviews of each cluster is indicated in parentheses.
In Table 1, it could be seen that the value of attention TF-IDF was
generally higher than that of TF-IDF. This meant that the SOM increased
the influence of major affective vocabulary with high frequency for each
cluster by the feed-forward attention mechanism when generating
clusters while minimizing effects of other affective words on clustering.
5.3. Results of sentiment clustering for sub-cluster
A dendrogram derived through agglomerative hierarchical clus­
tering did not provide a unique criterion for clustering. When clustering
was performed based on data, some clusters might consist of multiple
sub-clusters. Partitioning at different levels for each branch in the
dendrogram to perform rational partitioning on specific data has been
proposed by Vesanto & Alhoniemi (2000).
The number of reviews belonging to cluster No. 9 out of ten clusters
derived based on the ward-linkage criteria used in this study was 1,602,
which was relatively large compared to other clusters. When many re­
views are included in a cluster, it can be considered that the cluster
consists of core affective responses constituting the cluster with related
sub-level affective responses. Therefore, in this study, cluster 9 was
additionally partitioned using a dynamic threshold. Results are shown in
Fig. 8 below. The value of dynamic threshold was 0.001.
As a result of the partition using dynamic threshold, cluster 9 was
divided into three sub-groups as shown in Fig. 9. The first sub-cluster
contained nodes No. 46/52/53/54. The second sub-cluster contained
nodes No. 48/55/56. The third sub-cluster contained nodes No. 34/35/
40/41/42/47.
In these three sub-groups derived from cluster 9, five affective vo­
cabularies with the highest value of TF-IDF vector and context vector
were calculated. Results are shown in Table 2 below. It was confirmed
that the average score of context vector was generally higher than that of
TF-IDF in the subgroup, similar to results shown in Section 5.2. In the
case of clusters 9–1 and 9–3, it was confirmed that ‘comfort’ did not rank
in the top criteria for the value of TD-IDF vector, although it was
included in criterion for the value of context vector.
W. Kim et al.
Fig. 5. The procedure of the DASOM model used in the experiment.
6. Discussion
6.1. Discussion of key findings
Analyzing and categorizing customer reviews is very important
because a user’s emotional experience can help us understand the suc­
cess of the product in the market and the direction of future product
innovation and development. Customer review data include emotions
divided into positive, neutral, or negative. These emotions are config­
ured in various forms, such as opposing, hierarchical, and compatible.
The proposed clustering method utilizes a deep learning approach to
categorize users’ emotions, find essential affective information about
products, and understand and review their associations.
Forming a collective affective experience for a product displayed on
an e-commerce platform can affect consumers’ evaluation and purchase
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Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 58 (2023) 101250
of the product (Fang et al., 2016). Therefore, accurately categorizing
core affective experience in customer reviews can be essential in product
design and advertising strategies. In addition, since the affective expe­
rience that occurs when a user uses a product is related to several
product attributes, it can be used to prioritize product development by
identifying their relationship. For example, in conjunction with the Kano
model and the product life cycle, when a product corresponding to an
early market is developed, if design elements or affective experiences
corresponding to attractive quality appear in customer reviews, it can be
expected to have a positive effect in the market (Kano, 1984).
Results of an investigation through a case study showed that various
affective experiences for a product could be categorized more effectively
with the proposed method than the conventional method. For example,
the affective experience included in all clusters of data for a recliner was
‘comfort,’ which could be seen as the most common and essential
W. Kim et al. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 58 (2023) 101250

Fig. 6. Results for analysis of hierarchical clustering.

Fig. 7. Results of sentiment clustering for customer reviews using DASOM.

affective experience with the recliner. In addition, the value of the
context vector compared to the value of TF-IDF in ‘comfort’ was found to
increase for all clusters. This trend can be interpreted as a more signif­
icant influence of ’comfort’ in all clusters by the forward attention
mechanism. Through this, it can be seen that when a customer using a
recliner expresses an experience about the product, emotional factors
related to subjective comfort are universally applied. These results are
consistent with those of previous studies. For example, Kim et al. (2018)
conducted a survey targeting experts and asked users using a Likert Scale
widely used in the field of affective engineering. As a result, they derived
that ‘comfort’ was the most critical emotional experience factor when
using a train seat. Kim et al. (2019) analyzed the frequency of
demonstrative adjectives for recliner end-user reviews. As a result,
‘comfort’ was derived as the most appropriate affective adjective for a
recliner.
6.2. Theoretical implications
Identifying the core value of a product by categorizing customers’
emotions using the product can help develop a product based on a
positive affective experience of a customer. A user’s affective experience
can influence a company’s decision-making by identifying product
characteristics affecting customer purchasing behavior. This study
attempted to categorize the affective experience of a product by using an

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W. Kim et al. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 58 (2023) 101250

Table 1
Results of top 5 affective vocabularies based on the value of TF-IDF and context vector for each 10 clusters.
Affective Vocabulary Attractive Comfort Love Nice Perfect Soft

TF-IDF (Ratio) 0.32 0.18 (4.55%) – 0.19 (4.61%) 0.15 (3.73%) 1.08 (26.49%)
(7.85%)
Context value (Ratio) 0.0017 (8.15%) 0.0013 (6.24%) 0.0012 (5.59%) 0.0007 (3.49%) – 0.0088 (41.87%)

(a)

Affective Vocabulary Comfort Difficult Happy Love Nice Tight

TF-IDF (Ratio) 0.11 (3.53%) 0.62 (19.47%) 0.70 (22.19%) – 0.13 (4.24%) 0.10 (3.31%)
Context value (Ratio) 0.0007 (4.20%) 0.0048 (30.45%) 0.0048 (30.37%) 0.0007 (4.48%) 0.0007 (4.65%) –

(b)

Affective Vocabulary Best Comfort Disappoint Nice Poor Vibrate

TF-IDF (Ratio) 0.13 (6.72%) 0.10 (4.89%) 0.17 (8.53%) 0.52 (26.82%) – 0.23 (11.86%)
Context value (Ratio) 0.0009 (5.89%) 0.0011 (7.51%) – 0.0061 (40.14%) 0.0010 (6.26%) 0.0019 (12.33%)

(c)

Affective Vocabulary Cheap Comfort Hard High Long Nice Poor Inconvenient
TF-IDF (Ratio) 1.42 (43.03%) – – 0.12 (3.73%) 0.12 (3.71%) – 0.09 (2.70%) 0.11 (3.26%)
Context value (Ratio) 0.0086 (58.26%) 0.0005 (3.63%) 0.0009 (5.91%) – – 0.0003 (2.36%) 0.0004 (2.62%) –

(d)

Affective Vocabulary Comfort Love Nice Old Perfect Quiet

TF-IDF (Ratio) 0.10 (4.84%) 0.61 (30.71%) – 0.10 (5.00%) 0.16 (8.13%) 0.08 (4.07%)
Context value (Ratio) 0.0009 (5.97%) 0.0088 (56.04%) 0.0005 (3.38%) – 0.0009 (5.89%) 0.0007 (4.26%)

(e)

Affective Vocabulary Comfort Glad Love Perfect Satisfied Wonderful

TF-IDF (Ratio) 0.12 (3.70%) 0.77 (23.27%) – 0.12 (3.48%) 0.62 (18.62%) 0.43 (12.92%)
Context value (Ratio) 0.0008 (5.00%) 0.0057 (34.63%) 0.0006 (3.93%) – 0.0016 (9.98%) 0.0037 (22.47%)

(f)

Comfort Large Nice Perfect Pleased

Affective Vocabulary
TF-IDF (Ratio) 0.13 (4.05%) 0.86 (27.29%) 0.11 (3.53%) 0.15 (4.91%) 0.51 (16.15%)
Context value (Ratio) 0.0009 (6.08%) 0.0057 (39.24%) 0.0006 (3.88%) 0.0005 (3.51%) 0.0026 (18.22%)

(g)

Affective Vocabulary Comfort Durable Excellent Hard High Love Perfect

TF-IDF (Ratio) 0.12 (3.43%) 0.43 (12.12%) 1.16 (32.65%) – 0.12 (3.52%) – 0.11 (3.07%)
Context value (Ratio) 0.0006 (3.45%) 0.0020 (11.95%) 0.0086 (52.35%) 0.0004 (2.26%) – 0.0006 (3.70%) –

(h)

Affective Vocabulary Comfort High Long Perfect Sturdy

TF-IDF (Ratio) 0.19 (8.11%) 0.15 (6.44%) 0.12 (5.04%) 0.15 (6.59%) 0.13 (5.54%)
Context value (Ratio) 0.0022 (23.44%) 0.0007 (7.88%) 0.0006 (6.41%) 0.0011 (11.49%) 0.0007 (7.74%)

(i)

Affective Vocabulary Awesome Comfort Flat Hard Stiff

TF-IDF (Ratio) 0.30 (10.22%) 0.11 (3.69%) 0.21 (6.98%) 0.79 (26.87%) 0.15 (5.08%)
Context value (Ratio) 0.0018 (10.86%) 0.0008 (5.10%) 0.0013 (7.57%) 0.0066 (36.67%) 0.0013 (7.66%)
(j)

explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) technique and to identify the
relationship between users’ affective experience and the core charac­
teristics of the product. Machine or deep learning methods used in
sentiment analysis have the advantage of showing higher accuracy than
traditional statistical approaches. Thus, they have been used in many
recent studies (Zhang et al., 2014; Do et al., 2019; Yadav & Vishwa­
karma, 2020). However, these techniques have the disadvantage that is
expressing the causal relationship of categorization is difficult without
providing adequate reliability. Since the neural network-based SOM
model performs clustering using a pre-defined TF-IDF-based document
vector, there is a possibility that a suitable cluster cannot be found. In
addition, the importance of each affective element may not be reflected.
Among these problems, the deep embedded self-organizing map
(DESOM) concept was proposed to solve the cluster fit. In DESOM, SOM
clustering was performed after embedding the input data in a space
suitable for clustering by combining an autoencoder and SOM. However,
since DESOM uses vectors embedded in the feature space, there is an
issue that it is impossible to interpret each cluster individually (Forest
et al., 2019).
Therefore, in this study, we proposed DASOM, which applied an
attention mechanism to deep clustering for the first time. In DASOM,
unlike DESOM, the role of each affective variable can be interpreted
through attention weight by using the size of the input vector of the SOM
in the same dimension as the input. As attention value can act as a
weight for each input variable, it is possible to understand why input
variables belong to the corresponding cluster. This makes it easier to
interpret the cluster, and affective variables included therein.
To understand consumer purchasing behavior for a product, it is
important to observe significant differences in the complex emotions of
customers. For example, in the case of ‘hard’, it could mean that the
tactile property of a product is hard. It is also an affective term
expressing difficulty assembling or installing a product. Since many af­
fective vocabularies have ambiguous expressions and meanings, as in
the case shown above, a DASOM that can suggest how affective terms
are mentioned and the reason for categorization among affective vo­
cabularies in research related to sentiment analysis is needed.

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W. Kim et al.
Fig. 8. Results of setting criteria for generating sub-clusters (ward linkage = 0.001).
Fig. 9. Result of dividing cluster 9 into sub-clusters.
6.3. Practical implications
The results of this study suggest consistent outputs in terms of the
applicability and suitability of DASOM for customer sentiment clus­
tering. First, it is possible to grasp the main affective elements of a
specific product more clearly than TF-IDF. Using data sets applied in this
study, it was confirmed that various affective factors could represent
each cluster except for ‘comfort’ mentioned in the previous section. In
the case of cluster 1, the recliner was expressed as ’soft’, an affective
vocabulary related to the tactile sense of the surface material. Looking at
tactile-related studies on materials and products, Chen et al. (2009) have
confirmed that ’slippery-sticky’ and ’hard-soft’ are the most necessary
affective experiences of tactile preference for various types (37 types) of
fabrics. ‘Soft’ and ‘comfort’ are affective words used to express the
comfort level of a seat. ‘Attractive’ is an affective word used to describe a
unique design (Hapsari et al., 2017).
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Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 58 (2023) 101250
On the other hand, in the case of cluster 10, the tactile sensibility of
‘hard’ (36.67%), the opposite of ‘soft’, was categorized as a represen­
tative affective experience of the cluster. Similar to ’stiff’ (7.66%),
perceived as a somewhat negative expression regarding usability and
tactile sensitivity, ’hard’ also revealed difficulties encountered when
installing or using the product (Kim et al., 2019; Kim, 2021). As such, it
could be seen that reviews belonging to cluster 10 showed a complex
affective experience. In addition, it was confirmed that even in group 2,
a multi-dimensional emotion was implied when evaluating products,
like in group 10. Many reviews pointed out the difficulty of assembling
or processing and using a specific function through the affective vo­
cabulary ‘difficult’. However, they expressed happiness about other
factors, such as color and cost-effectiveness. Therefore, the easier the
recliner’s assembly, processing, and function, the higher the evaluation
from users of Cluster 2.
In cluster 3, similarly to clusters 1 and 10, tactile sensitivity was
W. Kim et al. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 58 (2023) 101250

Table 2
Results of top 5 affective vocabularies based on the value of TF-IDF and context vector for sub-clusters in cluster 9.
Affective Vocabulary Comfort Heavy Long Old Quick Sturdy

TF-IDF (Ratio) – 0.19 0.32 (11.13%) 0.34 (11.79%) 0.18 (6.16%) 0.53 (18.18%)
(6.64%)
Context value (Ratio) 0.0012 (8.75%) 0.0010 (7.27%) 0.0024 (17.45%) 0.0022 (15.53%) – 0.0033 (23.43%)

(a)

Affective Vocabulary Comfort High Pretty Relax Simple Tight

TF-IDF (Ratio) 0.27 (22.78%) 0.09 0.09 (7.40%) 0.05 (4.05%) 0.07 (5.77%) –
(7.76%)
Context value (Ratio) 0.0037 (54.15%) 0.0005 (7.84%) 0.0004 (6.13%) – 0.0003 (4.87%) 0.0004 (5.58%)

(b)

Affective Vocabulary Beautiful Comfort High Perfect Pretty Inconvenient

TF-IDF (Ratio) 0.27 (7.57%) – 0.28 (7.80%) 0.38 (10.46%) 0.19 (5.21%) 0.14 (3.92%)
Context value (Ratio) 0.0013 (13.39%) 0.0006 (5.92%) 0.0013 (13.63%) 0.0031 (32.35%) – 0.0006 (6.68%)
(c)

important. The group evaluated the recliner as ‘nice’ (40.14%), an af­
fective vocabulary with a positive meaning, and used the affective vo­
cabulary ‘vibrate’ (12.33%) as the basis. Unlike ‘soft’ or ‘hard’ for
expressing the surface material, ‘vibrate’ is an affective vocabulary that
describes the vibrotactile of an object (Asaga et al., 2013). Humans sense
vibration, temperature, and material as emotional elements when
interacting with an object (Jafar et al., 2018). In other words, reviews
composing group 3 mainly evaluated the massage function of the elec­
tric recliner, which was closely related to vibration. It could be under­
stood that most users expressed satisfaction through ‘nice’ regarding the
vibration of this massage function.
On the other hand, in cluster 4, ’cheap’ (58.26%) and ’hard’ (5.91%)
pointed out the low quality of the product due to the size and incon­
venience of use. In contrast, in cluster 7, ’large’ (39.24%) and ’pleased’

Fig. 10. Results of values of TF-IDF, Attention, and Context vector for affective vocabularies in each review.

11
W. Kim et al.
(18.22%) confirmed that the product’s design elements were expressed
positively.
In cluster 8, affective vocabularies such as ‘excellent’ (52.35%) and
‘durable’ (11.95%) mainly appeared. ’Durable’ is an affective vocabu­
lary when describing the user’s focus on safety when evaluating a chair
(Rahman, 2012; Hapsaril et al., 2017). Based on reviews of cluster 8, it
was confirmed that the one-dimensional quality factor in the Kano
model was critical in product evaluation. It is judged that users value the
safety of the recliner. Thus, the recliner product designer will need to
secure the level of quality expected by the user by improving its
durability.
Second, to verify the effectiveness of the DASOM algorithm in more
depth, this study analyzed individual reviews belonging to several
clusters.
Fig. 10 shows the TF-IDF, attention weight, and context vector score
of individual reviews belonging to the cluster. Each figure results from
reviews No. 15, 255, 1663, 18, and 394. Review No. 15, belonging to
cluster 1, had high TF-IDF values for ’relax’ and ’solid’ but was set to
have high z-score values for ’soft’ based on attention weight (Fig. 10
(a)). In other words, if clustering was carried out using the existing TF-
IDF, it was reasonable that review 15 was assigned to the cluster for
‘relax’ or ‘solid’ rather than ‘soft’. However, due to the effect of the
attention mechanism, the clustering algorithm contributed more to
forming a cluster for ‘soft’ by paying more attention to ‘soft’. The impact
of the attention mechanism could also be confirmed in (b) and (c) in
Fig. 10.
Review number 255 was reversed from ‘awesome’ to ‘love’. Review
number 1663 was assigned to clusters 5 and 2, respectively, from
‘awesome’ to ‘happy’. What was noteworthy here was that existing TF-
IDF values of Review No. 255 and Review No. 1663 belonging to Cluster
5 and Cluster 2 were very similar. Values for ‘awesome’ and ‘happy’
were the same. However, the value of ‘love’, which existed only in re­
view number 255, had a much lower influence. According to the TF-IDF
standard, it is a reasonable clustering result to be grouped into the same
emotional clusters for ‘awesome’ or ‘happy’. However, DASOM assigned
review No. 1663 to the ‘happy’ cluster (cluster 2), whereas review No.
255 was assigned to the ‘love’ cluster (cluster 5). This overcame the
limitation of TF-IDF, which gave a low value to ‘love’ because it was a
frequent word in the entire review. It can be seen as an example of
confirming that DASOM can effectively analyze sentiment through more
detailed clustering.
Finally, (d) and (e) of Fig. 10 show three figures for each review No.
18 and No. 394 included in the emotional cluster represented by ‘large’.
Each review had a very different TF-IDF vector. Review number 18
showed the highest number in the order of ‘disappoint’, ‘difficult’, and
‘large’. Review number 394 showed the highest number in the order of
‘pleased’, ‘large’, and ‘love’. According to the TF-IDF standard, it was
reasonable for reviews No. 18 and No. 394 to belong to different clus­
ters, contrary to (b) and (c) of Fig. 10. However, DASOM assigned both
reviews to cluster 7, paying attention to ‘large’. The cluster contained
design sensibility related to the size of the recliner.
Results for the three sub-groups derived from cluster 9 confirmed
that the first cluster was categorized into affective vocabularies such as
‘sturdy’ and ‘long’. In the second cluster, the recliner was recognized
with affective vocabularies such as ‘comfort’ and ‘high’. In the last
cluster, affective vocabularies such as ‘high’ and ‘beautiful’ were mainly
expressed along with ‘perfect’. ‘Perfect’ is an affective vocabulary
frequently used when users of the recliner feel comfortable (Kim et al.,
2019). ‘Beautiful’ is an affective vocabulary that best expresses aesthetic
excellence in product image evaluation. Therefore, it can be seen that
comfort and visual image are essential to attract group users to
customers.
7. Conclusion and future research direction
In this study, DASOM, an interpretable clustering algorithm, was
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Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 58 (2023) 101250
proposed. DASOM forms a collaborative learning network with self-
organizing maps and denoising autoencoders to prevent distortion of
input data and perform correct clustering through the robustness of
representation learning. In addition, by applying the forward attention
mechanism inside the denoising autoencoder, the process and results of
clustering can be interpreted by the adjustment effect of attention
weight.
The effect of DASOM was verified through a case study on customer
reviews of the recliner on Amazon. Users’ sentiment toward the product
was analyzed. As a result of the analysis, it was confirmed that various
factors related to the user’s experience, such as the design feature of the
product, usability, and subjective feeling, were complexly structured.
Results demonstrate that DASOM helps derive each element into an
appropriate cluster. In particular, it was confirmed that the process of
forming a corresponding cluster of individual reviews could be inter­
preted based on the effect of the attention mechanism on affective vo­
cabularies. DASOM confirmed that patterns of affective elements that
were difficult to detect in TF-IDF commonly used in studies related to
sentiment analysis through existing NLP could be more effectively
clustered. Affective factors of users for each group derived from this
study are expected to provide critical information on customizing
essential for product design.
The limitations of this study are as follows. First, this study used
Amazon data as a case study. Although Amazon is the largest commerce
platform in the world, it cannot represent all data. Therefore, it is
necessary to conduct research using data from various platforms in the
future. In addition, the data set included English reviews only. Even for
the same product, differences in affective experience may occur for
different languages and cultures. Thus, future work should consider the
development of a sentiment classification method by cross-verifying
data from multiple cultures. Based on the results of this study, it is
necessary to discuss the general use of the methodology for sentiment
clustering by classifying star ratings or positive/negative customer
reviews.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Wonjoon Kim: Conceptualization, Validation, Formal analysis,
Investigation, Data curation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review &
editing, Funding acquisition. Keonwoo Nam: Methodology, Validation,
Writing – original draft. Youngdoo Son: Conceptualization, Writing –
review & editing, Funding acquisition.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence
the work reported in this paper.
Data availability
Data will be made available on request.
Acknowledgment
This research was supported by the National Research Foundation of
Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT: Ministry of
Science and ICT) (No. 2020R1G1A1003384, RS-2023-00208412) and
also by Korea Institute of Planning and Evaluation for Technology in
Food, Agriculture, Forestry (IPET) through Smart Agri Products Flow
Storage Technology Development Program, funded by Ministry of
Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (MAFRA) of Korea (No.322050-3).
W. Kim et al. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 58 (2023) 101250

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