Uwe Sander


2019

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Sentiment Independent Topic Detection in Rated Hospital Reviews
Christian Wartena | Uwe Sander | Christiane Patzelt
Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computational Semantics - Short Papers

We present a simple method to find topics in user reviews that accompany ratings for products or services. Standard topic analysis will perform sub-optimal on such data since the word distributions in the documents are not only determined by the topics but by the sentiment as well. We reduce the influence of the sentiment on the topic selection by adding two explicit topics, representing positive and negative sentiment. We evaluate the proposed method on a set of over 15,000 hospital reviews. We show that the proposed method, Latent Semantic Analysis with explicit word features, finds topics with a much smaller bias for sentiments than other similar methods.