Analyzing writing styles of bloggers with different opinions
TH Park, J Li, Hua Zhao, Michael Chau · 2009
Understanding customers is crucial to companies’ decision-making. With the advent of Web 2.0, more and mo re p eople ch oose to exp ress th eir feelin gs a nd a rticulate th eir a ttitudes th rough online social communities such as blogs and web forums. These new sources of information offer the potential to obtain large quantities of customer feedback using automated analysis techniques. In th is pap er, we stu dy ho w p eople with d ifferent o pinions to ward a commerci al p roduct write differently in their blogs. We define and extract four types of stylometric features – namely lexical, syntactic, structural, and sentimental features – t o represent a blogger's writing style. Based on multivariate analyses on a data set of iPod-relat ed blogs, we found vari ous writing style patterns of bloggers. Our analysis shows that a b logger’s writing style is ma rginally related to his or her opinion toward a product.