Online Review Analytics: New Methods for discovering Key Product Quality and Service Concerns

The purpose of this dissertation intends to discover as well as categorize safety concern reports in online reviews by using key terms prevalent in sub-categories of safety concerns. This dissertation extends the literature of semi-automatic text classification methodology in monitoring and classifying product quality and service concerns. We develop various text classification methods for finding key concerns across a diverse set of product and service categories. Additionally, we generalize our results by testing the performance of our methodologies on online reviews collected from two different data sources (Amazon product reviews and Facebook hospital service reviews). Stakeholders such as product designers and safety regulators can use the semi-automatic classification procedure to subcategorize safety concerns by injury type and narrative type (Chapter 1). We enhance the text classification approach by proposing a Risk Assessment Model for quality management (QM) professionals, safety regulators, and product designers to allow them to estimate overall risk level of specific products by analyzing consumer-generated content in online reviews (Chapter 2). Monitoring and prioritizing the hazard risk levels of products will help the stakeholders to make appropriate actions on mitigating the risk of product safety. Lastly, the text classification approach discovers and ranks aspects of services that predict overall user satisfaction (Chapter 3). The key service terms are beneficial for healthcare providers to rapidly trace specific service concerns for improving the hospital services.