TOUR: Dynamic Topic and Sentiment Analysis of User Reviews for Assisting App Release
This provides a practical tool for app developers to monitor user feedback dynamically, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing topic modeling and sentiment analysis methods.
The paper tackles the problem of analyzing dynamic user reviews for app releases by introducing TOUR, a tool that detects emerging issues, identifies sentiment towards features, and prioritizes reviews, with evaluation showing 15 developers confirming its practical usefulness.
App reviews deliver user opinions and emerging issues (e.g., new bugs) about the app releases. Due to the dynamic nature of app reviews, topics and sentiment of the reviews would change along with app release versions. Although several studies have focused on summarizing user opinions by analyzing user sentiment towards app features, no practical tool is released. The large quantity of reviews and noise words also necessitates an automated tool for monitoring user reviews. In this paper, we introduce TOUR for dynamic TOpic and sentiment analysis of User Reviews. TOUR is able to (i) detect and summarize emerging app issues over app versions, (ii) identify user sentiment towards app features, and (iii) prioritize important user reviews for facilitating developers' examination. The core techniques of TOUR include the online topic modeling approach and sentiment prediction strategy. TOUR provides entries for developers to customize the hyper-parameters and the results are presented in an interactive way. We evaluate TOUR by conducting a developer survey that involves 15 developers, and all of them confirm the practical usefulness of the recommended feature changes by TOUR.