A Bayesian Sampling Method for Product Feature Extraction From Large-Scale Textual Data

The authors of this work propose an algorithm that determines optimal search keyword combinations for querying online product data sources in order to minimize identification errors during the product feature extraction process. Data-driven product design methodologies based on acquiring and mining online product-feature-related data are presented with two fundamental challenges: (1) determining optimal search keywords that result in relevant product related data being returned and (2) determining how many search keywords are sufficient to minimize identification errors during the product feature extraction process. These challenges exist because online data, which is primarily textual in nature, may violate several statistical assumptions relating to the independence and identical distribution of samples relating to a query. Existing design methodologies have predetermined search terms that are used to acquire textual data online, which makes the resulting data acquired, a function of the quality of the search term(s) themselves. Furthermore, the lack of independence and identical distribution of text data from online sources impacts the quality of the acquired data. For example, a designer may search for a product feature using the term “screen,” which may return relevant results such as “the screen size is just perfect,” but may also contain irrelevant noise such as “researchers should really screen for this type of error.” A text mining algorithm is introduced to determine the optimal terms without labeled training data that would maximize the veracity of the data acquired to make a valid conclusion. A case study involving real-world smartphones is used to validate the proposed methodology.