Synonyms Weighted LDA for Product Aspects Extraction

Abstract

It is important to extract the aspects from the comments of shoppers about certain products. Product aspect descriptions often contain words of same meaning, and discriminating these synonyms effectively can improve the efficiency of aspects extraction. Standard topic model in identifying those words, because of the absent introduction of priori knowledge, will largely ignore the relations of words meaning. An improved aspects extracting model of LDA by adding synonymous words constraint is proposed in this paper. In the process of words clustering analysis, words with high similarity are aggregated in the same cluster. In the stage of aspects extraction, we introduce words clustering and cluster membership weights as priori knowledge to strengthen the original LDA topic model for features clustering, which can improve the accuracy of product aspects extraction. Our experiments show that synonyms weighted LDA proposed in this paper outperforms the original LDA by a large margin.