Looking beyond the stars: A description of text mining technique to extract latent dimensions from online product reviews

The purpose of this study is to contribute to the marketing literature and practice by describing a research methodology to identify latent dimensions of customer satisfaction in product reviews, and examining the relationship between these attributes and customer satisfaction. Previous research in product reviews has largely relied only on quantitative ratings, either stars or review score. Advanced techniques for text mining provide the opportunity to extract meaning from customer online reviews. By analyzing 51,110 online reviews for 1,610 restaurants via latent Dirichlet allocation, this study uncovers 30 latent dimensions that are determinants of customer satisfaction. Furthermore, this study developed measurements of sentiment and innovativeness as moderators of the effect of these latent attributes to satisfaction.