A Tree for Understanding Customers: What is an NLP Dictionary?

In the realm of Natural Language Processing (NLP), dictionaries or ontologies play an essential role in making sense of people's sentiments via text analysis of online customer ratings and reviews. These so-called AI-driven digital dictionaries are powerful tools that help businesses understand customers feelings about specific product aspects, such as product or service features, characteristics, and performance. In turn, customer-centric companies can improve their product development cycles and the overall customer experience. A dictionary in NLP sentiment analysis isn't like a typical language dictionary. Instead, it's a collection of "labels" that cluster those (often used) business-related concepts expressed by end-users (reviewers) during their product experience.

‍Note: Different products have different dictionaries, with customer feedback topics varying based on the product. For instance, a coffee machine and a hair dryer share topics like price, design, and usability, but the coffee machine dictionary includes topics like taste that won't be present in the hair dryer dictionary. In another instance, consider a dictionary for an electric body razor. A label like "Contour Shaving" would aggregate all expressions where users talk about how a particular shaver performs when used for precision shaving.

Dictionaries don't just stop there; they are organized hierarchically like trees, with topics defined from the most generic to the most specific. Imagine an umbrella of terms breaking down to a multitude of sub-topics or 'branches.' The all-embracing topics, also known as 'parent topics,' sport a host of related 'child' topics. For example, a parent topic like "Food Characteristics" in a food dictionary might have child topics like "Taste," "Consistency," "Flavour," "Ingredients," and so on. Take a look at this example of the broad feedback topic of Cutting Performance for a male grooming razor and its child topics:

In another example, let's specifically examine Wonderflow's highly advanced consumer sentiment dictionary. Our NLP-driven analysis is run using a dictionary that lists the most relevant and common customer feedback topics you can think of. For businesses to effectively understand how their customers think or feel via ratings and reviews, we've built an incredibly unique "dictionary tree" that allows you to see the dependencies and relationships of feedback topics in the dictionary.

Accompanying the tree-like diagrams are usually tables of definitions to help you understand specifically what the user might have meant in their product review regarding a certain product attribute. The table lists all related parent topics with their respective definitions to help, for example, a Product Manager or Marketing Director understand the context of the customer's review more closely.

Look at this example below; the definition table represents several customer feedback talking about the Performance of a certain tire product, with customers commonly using the keyword Grip, and the varying situations of what those customers had meant in their reviews about the tire:

Why It's Important to Understand the Customer Sentiment with an NLP Dictionary

The hierarchical nature of these dictionaries enables nuanced sentiment analysis, capturing the breadth and depth of user sentiment. By classifying feedback under these topic labels, businesses can dive deeper into specific areas of concern or appreciation, leading to actionable insights for product development and customer service. By capturing customer sentiment at both a granular and broad level, these 'sentiment dictionaries' help businesses discern what's working and what needs improvement straight from the users. They bridge the gap between user reviews and business strategy, guiding the way towards superior product offerings and customer satisfaction. If you would simply like to learn more about natural language processing, check out 20 NLP examples, or see how customer sentiment dictionaries work, get in touch with Wonderflow's Business Intelligence for more specific questions. We'd be happy to show you just how powerful your customers words truly are for your organization's success.