Professor Thomas Otter, from Goethe University Frankfurt, will present "Accounting for formative and reflective topics in product review data for better consumer insights".

Abstract: Observations of product and service reviews suggest that textual product reviews may contain statements that talk about the overall experience ("We had a great time") or, similarly, whether to recommend a particular product. We argue that such statements encapsulate an overall assessment and hence are not independently informative about, but rather reflect overall ratings. We propose a model that allows for the distinction between topics that contribute to and topics that merely reflect an overall evaluation and apply it to a data set consisting of luxury hotel reviews. Compared to a standard supervised LDA, our model fits the data better and improves customer insights by resulting in more semantically coherent topics that point to specific attributes with positive and negative relationships to customers’ evaluation of their experience.