Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis of Ridesharing Platform Reviews for Kansei Engineering

At present online reviews are becoming an important source for Kansei engineering of the services provided by ridesharing platforms. Kansei engineering deals with incorporating customer feedback and demands into product and service design. Thus, it is used as a tool for organizations to uplift their businesses by considering customer reviews and feedback. Customer reviews available on social media are in unstructured form; therefore, sentiment analysis is employed to extract customer's opinions in a systematic manner. In India-Pakistan, these reviews are mostly in Roman Urdu/Hindi and English, which are of great value for ridesharing platforms as a part of their Kansei engineering strategy. However, sentiment analysis cannot be performed directly on these reviews as they are mostly in Roman Urdu/Hindi. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to conduct aspect based sentiment analysis on these reviews after translating them into English for Kansei engineering of the service. Consequently, sentiment analysis is carried out to extract the most frequent features along with nouns and adjectives used by the customers to express their sentiments. We extracted prominent aspects of the service (i.e., `Driver', `Company', `Service', and `Ride') based on their highest frequencies using aspect based sentiment analysis. The customer sentiments are then clustered into these main aspects using unsupervised machine learning technique. Each aspect is further analyzed based on their polarity, which serves as an input for Kansei engineering of the service. As a result, it can facilitate ridesharing companies to enhance their businesses by improving services in accordance with customer demands.