Topic Analysis Of Online Reviews For Competitive Products Based On LDA

In today's quicksilver market environment,understanding customer needs and its changes play a crucial role in the company's product competition.The traditional methods of acquiring customer needs and its changes mainly focus on market research and questionnaires.Not only the cost of research is high,but the accuracy of market research and questionnaires is susceptible to customer samples.With the development and prevalence of online shopping platforms,online product reviews not only provide a good and reliable channel for understanding customers' needs for a product or service,but also provide a good decision-making basis for enterprises to analyze product competition in the market.However,existing online review studies either focus on analysis across the industry or fail to take full advantage of online reviews of products to obtain more general conclusions.Then,how to make full use of online reviews to analyze competing products,understand customer needs,and reveal the changing trend of customer needs,and guiding product positioning and market competition strategy is a problem worth studying.In this paper,we present a new approach about using online product review analysis to analyze customer preferences and their changes for two competing products and to derive competitive advantages and disadvantages.First,in order to leverage online reviews of competing products to capture and understand customer needs,we use the text mining method Latent Dirichlet Allocation(LDA)to extract key topics of online reviews for two specific competing products.The topic can be a specific product feature or a customer's shopping experience.The topic difference analysis shows the unique topics of the two products,and the relative importance and topic heterogeneity analysis determine the competitive advantages and disadvantages of the two products.Then,focusing on dynamic changes of customer needs,the time window is divided and the topic on each time window is extracted using the LDA method.Then,based on the relevant measures in the existing research and the evolution potential measure defined on these measures,we analyze the evolution process of the topics from the three aspects of topic content,intensity and status.Thus,we obtained the dynamic changes of customer needs and provide a basis for product design,product improvement,and the formulation of product competition strategy.Finally,the two case studies in this paper prove the efficiency and generality of the research framework,which also provides valuable management implications for product designers and e-commerce companies.