A Fuzzy PROMETHEE Approach for Mining Customer Reviews in Chinese

Online customer reviews of products have a great impact on potential customers' purchase decisions and provide valuable customer opinions to businesses. However, it is difficult for a customer to go through the huge number of customer reviews of a product to make an informed decision. The opinion comparison, one of the important tasks in opinion mining, uses main product features that have been commented upon by consumers to compare competing products. Because the task of comparing customer opinions can be expressed as the ranking of alternative products using key product features, it can be modeled as a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) problem. The goal of this paper is to propose fuzzy PROMETHEE, an MCDM method, to rank alternative products based on online customer reviews of products. An experiment is designed to test the proposed method using a sample of Chinese reviews of mobile phones. The results demonstrate that this approach can not only generate a reliable and realistic ranking of products, but also identify key product features that are considered by consumers as the most important aspects of a product.