OpinionSeer: Interactive Visualization of Hotel Customer Feedback

Yingcai Wu¹     Furu Wei¹     Shixia Liu¹     Norman Au²     Weiwei Cui¹     Hong Zhou³     Huamin Qu^4
1Microsoft Research Asia      ²Hong Kong PolyTechnic University
     ³Shenzhen University      ⁴Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

(a) Temporal rings at different scales (month, week, and day); (b) Temporal and geographic rings where their relationships can be shown on demand by the curved belts.

The rapid development of Web technology has resulted in an increasing number of hotel customers sharing their opinions on the hotel services. Effective visual analysis of online customer opinions is needed, as it has a significant impact on building a successful business. In this paper, we present OpinionSeer, an interactive visualization system that could visually analyze a large collection of online hotel customer reviews. The system is built on a new visualization-centric opinion mining technique that considers uncertainty for faithfully modeling and analyzing customer opinions. A new visual representation is developed to convey customer opinions by augmenting well-established scatterplots and radial visualization. To provide multiple-level exploration, we introduce subjective logic to handle and organize subjective opinions with degrees of uncertainty. Several case studies illustrate the effectiveness and usefulness of OpinionSeer on analyzing relationships among multiple data dimensions and comparing opinions of different groups. Aside from data on hotel customer feedback, OpinionSeer could also be applied to visually analyze customer opinions on other products or services.

@article {YWu2010a,
author = {Yingcai Wu and Furu Wei and Shixia Liu and Norman Au and Weiwei Cui and Hong Zhou and Huamin Qu},
title = {OpinionSeer: Interactive Visualization of Hotel Customer Feedback} ,
journal = {IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics},
year = {2010},
volume = {16},
number = {6},
pages = {1109--1118}
}

The authors would like to thank Prof. Rob Law in the School of Hotel & Tourism Management at the Hong Kong PolyTechnic University for his help with the system design. This work was supported in part by grant HK RGC GRF 619309 and an IBM Faculty Award.