An Integration of Sentiment Analysis and MCDM Approach for Smartphone Recommendation

Today, smartphones are being used to manage almost all aspects of our lives, ranging from personal to professional. Different users have different requirements and preferences while selecting a smartphone. There is 'no one-size fits all' remedy when it comes to smartphones. Additionally, the availability of a wide variety of smartphones in the market makes it difficult for the user to select the best one. The use of only product ratings to choose the best smartphone is not sufficient because the interpretation of such ratings can be quite vague and ambiguous. In this paper, reviews of products are incorporated into the decision-making process in order to select the best product for a recommendation. The top five different brands of smartphones are considered for a case study. The proposed system, then, analyses the customer reviews of these smartphones from two online platforms, Flipkart and Amazon, using sentiment analysis techniques. Next, it uses a hybrid MCDM approach, where characteristics of AHP and TOPSIS methods are combined to evaluate the best smartphones from a list of five alternatives and recommend the best product. The result shows that brand1 smartphone is considered to be the best smartphone among five smartphones based on four important decision criteria. The result of the proposed system is also validated by manually annotated customer reviews of the smartphone by experts. It shows that recommendation of the best product by the proposed system matches the experts' ranking. Thus, the proposed system can be a useful decision support tool for the best smartphone recommendation.