BEYOND OPINION MINING How can Automatic Online Opinion Analysis Help in Product Design?

The rapid development of WWW, information technology and e-commerce has made the Internet forums, e-opinion portals and personal blogs widely accessible to consumers. As a result, nowadays it has become extremely popular for consumers to share their experience, point out their preferences and concerns with respect to a specific product on Web. These online customer reviews possess vital information that product designers can gain insights of their customers and products, and make improvements accordingly. However, the sheer amount of data, their distributed locations and the inherent ambiguity of human language have challenged designers greatly. In this paper, we aim to outline an intelligent system that is able to first automatically gather global online reviews with respect to certain products interested, identify the product features and customer requirements, and most importantly relates them to the product's engineering characteristics through quality function deployment (QFD), a tool that is widely used by product designers in the customer-driven design paradigm. Meanwhile, we also highlight the challenges and relevant research issues in order to fulfil such an ambition. As a pioneer study, we believe that this research will greatly help designers in the era of global competition and e-commerce.