The FLDA model for aspect-based opinion mining: addressing the cold start problem

Aspect-based opinion mining from online reviews has attracted a lot of attention recently. The main goal of all of the proposed methods is extracting aspects and/or estimating aspect ratings. Recent works, which are often based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), consider both tasks simultaneously. These models are normally trained at the item level, i.e., a model is learned for each item separately. Learning a model per item is fine when the item has been reviewed extensively and has enough training data. However, in real-life data sets such as those from Epinions.com and Amazon.com more than 90% of items have less than 10 reviews, so-called cold start items. State-of-the-art LDA models for aspect-based opinion mining are trained at the item level and therefore perform poorly for cold start items due to the lack of sufficient training data. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic graphical model based on LDA, called Factorized LDA (FLDA), to address the cold start problem. The underlying assumption of FLDA is that aspects and ratings of a review are influenced not only by the item but also by the reviewer. It further assumes that both items and reviewers can be modeled by a set of latent factors which represent their aspect and rating distributions. Different from state-of-the-art LDA models, FLDA is trained at the category level and learns the latent factors using the reviews of all the items of a category, in particular the non cold start items, and uses them as prior for cold start items. Our experiments on three real-life data sets demonstrate the improved effectiveness of the FLDA model in terms of likelihood of the held-out test set. We also evaluate the accuracy of FLDA based on two application-oriented measures.