Text Mining of User-Generated Content (UGC) for Business Applications in E-Commerce: A Systematic Review

In the Web2.0 era, user-generated content (UGC) provides a valuable source of data to aid in understanding consumers and driving intelligent business. Text mining techniques, such as semantic analysis and sentiment analysis, help to extract meaningful information embedded in UGC. However, research on text mining of UGC for e-commerce business applications involves interdisciplinary knowledge, and few studies have systematically summarized the research framework and application directions of related research in this field. First, based on e-commerce practice, in this study, we derive a general framework to summarize the mainstream research in this field. Second, widely used text mining techniques are introduced, including semantic and sentiment analysis. Furthermore, we analyze the development status of semantic analysis in terms of text representation and semantic understanding. Then, the definition, development, and technical classification of sentiment analysis techniques are introduced. Third, we discuss mainstream directions of text mining for business applications, ranging from high-quality UGC detection and consumer profiling, to product enhancement and marketing. Finally, research gaps with respect to these efforts are emphasized, and suggestions are provided for future work. We also provide prospective directions for future research.