Perspective Discovery in Controversial Debates: An exploration of unsupervised topic models

Since the introduction of the Web, online platforms have become a place to share opinions across various domains (e.g., social media platforms, discussion fora or webshops). Consequently, many researchers have seen a need to classify, summarise or categorise these large sets of unstructured user-generated content. A field related to this task is...

Latent Dirichlet Allocation: Explained and improved upon for applications in marketing intelligence

In today's digital world, customers give their opinions on a product that they have purchased online in the form of reviews. The industry is interested in these reviews, and wants to know about which topics their clients write, such that the producers can improve products on specific aspects. Topic models can extract the main topics from large...

Shared Perspectives on Perceptual Features for Query by Example in E-Commerce Systems

In this thesis, we focus on database query processing for so-called experience items, i.e., items commonly encountered in E-Commerce systems such as books, games or movies which are better described by their perceived subjective consumption experience, or Perceptual Features, than by factual meta-data normally used in SQL-style queries. To...

Aspect-based Review Extraction for E-Commerce Products

Nowadays, more and more products are sold online. Under popular products, there are normally hundreds or even thousands of reviews left by the previous customers. These reviews help potential buyers understand the products better and make the purchase decision. However, most shopping websites only give an overview score (e.g. 3 star out of 5) of...