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Opinion Driven Decision Support System (ODSS) refers to the use of large amounts of online opinions to facilitate business and consumer decision making. The idea is to combine the strengths of search technologies with opinion mining and analysis tools to provide a synergistic decision making platform. The research and engineering problems related to developing such a system include :

Opinions in this case can be aggregation of user reviews, blog comments, facebook status updates, Tweets and so on. Essentially any opinion containing texts on specific topics or entities qualify as candidates for building an ODSS platform. Here’s a description of some of the research and engineering problems towards developing an ODSS platform:

The goal of opinion-based search is to help users find entities of interest based on their key requirements. Since a user is often interested in choosing an entity based on opinions on that entity, a system that ranks entities based on a user’s personal preferences would provide a more direct support for a user’s decision-making task. For example, in the case of finding hotels at a destination, a user may only want to consider hotels where other people thought was clean. By finding and ranking hotels based on how well it satisfies such a requirement would significantly reduce the number of entities in consideration, facilitating decision making. Unlike traditional search, the query in this case is a set of preferences and the results is a set of entities that match these preferences. The challenge is to accurately match the user’s preferences with existing opinions in order to recommend the best entities. This special ranking problem is referred to as Opinion-Based Entity Ranking. Many of the existing opinion mining techniques can be potentially used for this new ranking task. I have explored information retrieval based techniques to specifically solve this ranking problem  and there has been a few follow-up works (from other groups) trying other approaches.

Opinion summaries play a critical role in helping users better analyze entities in consideration (e.g. product, physician, cars, politican). Users are often looking out for major concerns or advantages in selecting a specific entity. Thus, a summary that can quickly highlight the key opinions about the entity would significantly help exploration of entities and aid decision making. The field of opinion summarization has been long explored with most techniques being focused on generating structured summaries on a fixed set of topics. These are referred to as stuctured summaries. In the last few years, textual summaries of opinions have been gaining more and more popularity. Bing Liu’s Opinion Mining Tutorial covers some of these recent works or you can refer to this article point (5).

phd-thesis, sentiment analysis