Opinion integration through semi-supervised topic modeling

Web 2.0 technology has enabled more and more people to freely express their opinions on the Web, making the Web an extremely valuable source for mining user opinions about all kinds of topics. In this paper we study how to automatically integrate opinions expressed in a well-written expert review with lots of opinions scattering in various sources such as blogspaces and forums. We formally define this new integration problem and propose to use semi-supervised topic models to solve the problem in a principled way. Experiments on integrating opinions about two quite different topics (a product and a political figure) show that the proposed method is effective for both topics and can generate useful aligned integrated opinion summaries. The proposed method is quite general. It can be used to integrate a well written review with opinions in an arbitrary text collection about any topic to potentially support many interesting applications in multiple domains.