Hybrid RNN at SemEval-2019 Task 9: Blending Information Sources for Domain-Independent Suggestion Mining

Social media has an increasing amount of information that both customers and companies can benefit from. These social media posts can include Tweets or be in the form of vocalization of complements and complaints (e.g., reviews) of a product or service. Researchers have been actively mining this invaluable information source to automatically generate insights. Mining sentiments of customer reviews is an example that has gained momentum due to its potential to gather information that customers are not happy about. Instead of reading millions of reviews, companies prefer sentiment analysis to obtain feedback and to improve their products or services. In this work, we aim to identify information that companies can act on, or other customers can utilize for making their own experience better. This is different from identifying if reviews of a product or service is negative, positive, or neutral. To that end, we classify sentences of a given review as suggestion or not suggestion so that readers of the reviews do not have to go through thousands of reviews but instead can focus on actionable items and applicable suggestions. To identify suggestions within reviews, we employ a hybrid approach that utilizes a recurrent neural network (RNN) along with rule-based features to build a domain-independent suggestion mining model. In this way, a model trained on electronics reviews is used to extract suggestions from hotel reviews.