A novel self-supervised contrastive learning based sentence-level attribute induction method for online satisfaction evaluation

Satisfaction evaluation provides valuable support for procurement decisions and product improvement on e-commerce platforms. As an important task of satisfaction evaluation, attribute induction is essential to identify relevant aspects and demands of user-generated evaluations. However, previous methods have often directly predicted typical attributes using individual words, neglecting valuable sentence-level information that could significantly enhance effectiveness. To alleviate this issue, this article introduces the concept of representations of potential attributes (PARs) to explicitly capture sentence-level information regarding product attributes in customer reviews. It further develops a novel self-supervised contrastive learning based sentence-level attribute induction method (SSCL-SAI) to train these PARs. Recognizing that sentences are the basic units of human expression, this approach mitigates information loss. Then, an aspect-category sentiment analysis model is used to transform the unstructured online textual reviews into linguistic 2-tuple for obtaining final satisfaction evaluation result. These 2-tuples provide a representation of sentiment orientations on a continuous numerical scale, enabling precise linguistic operations. Afterwards, an illustrative example conducted on real-world laptop product satisfaction analysis testify the validity of the approach. Finally, the comparative analysis shows the effectiveness of the proposed SSCL-SAI, and experiments on the impact of hyperparameter settings demonstrate that SSCL-SAI can be applied in various scenarios.