MINING CONSUMER TRENDS FROM ONLINE REVIEWS: AN APPROACH FOR MARKET RESEARCH

Abstract

We present a novel marketing method for consumer trend detection from online user generated content, which is motivated by the gap identified in the market research literature. The existing approaches for trend analysis generally base on rating of trends by industry experts through survey questionnaires, interviews, or similar. These methods proved to be inherently costly and often suffer from bias. Our approach is based on the use of information extraction techniques for identification of trends in large aggregations of social media data. It is cost-effective method that reduces the possibility of errors associated with the design of the sample and the research instrument. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated in the experiment performed on restaurant review data. The accuracy of the results is at the level of current approaches for both, information extraction and market research.