On the design of LDA models for aspect-based opinion mining

Aspect-based opinion mining, which aims to extract aspects and their corresponding ratings from customers reviews, provides very useful information for customers to make purchase decisions. In the past few years several probabilistic graphical models have been proposed to address this problem, most of them based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). While these models have a lot in common, there are some characteristics that distinguish them from each other. These fundamental differences correspond to major decisions that have been made in the design of the LDA models. While research papers typically claim that a new model outperforms the existing ones, there is normally no "one-size-fits-all" model. In this paper, we present a set of design guidelines for aspect-based opinion mining by discussing a series of increasingly sophisticated LDA models. We argue that these models represent the essence of the major published methods and allow us to distinguish the impact of various design decisions. We conduct extensive experiments on a very large real life dataset from Epinions.com (500K reviews) and compare the performance of different models in terms of the likelihood of the held-out test set and in terms of the accuracy of aspect identification and rating prediction.