Distantly Supervised Aspect Clustering And Naming For E-Commerce Reviews

Product aspect extraction from reviews is a critical task for e-commerce services to understand customer preferences and pain points. While aspect phrases extraction and sentiment analysis have received a lot of attention, clustering of aspect phrases and assigning human readable names to clusters in e-commerce reviews is an extremely important and challenging problem due to the scale of the reviews that makes human review infeasible. In this paper, we propose fully automated methods for clustering aspect words and generating human readable names for the clusters without any manually labeled data. We train transformer based sentence embeddings that are aware of unique e-commerce language characteristics (eg. incomplete sentences, spelling and grammar errors, vernacular etc.). We also train transformer based sequence to sequence models to generate human readable aspect names from clusters. Both the models are trained using heuristic based distant supervision. Additionally, the models are used to improve each other. Extensive empirical testing showed that the clustering model improves the Silhouette Score by 64% when compared to the state-of-the-art baseline and the aspect naming model achieves a high ROUGE-L score of 0.79.