Unveiling User Sentiment: Aspect-Based Analysis and Topic Modeling of Ride-Hailing and Google Play App Reviews

Background: Mobile app usage is increasing in the digital age, with Ride-Hailing app becoming the primary example of this trend. To obtain valuable understanding of how people perceive and interact with mobile app, user reviews on platforms such as Google Play are usually analyzed. This analysis can assist developers to identify areas for improvement in both Ride-hailing and Google Play App. A promising method that can be used to analyze user perception in this instance is Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA). Objective: This research aimed to apply ABSA to user reviews using Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) models. In this context, aspect identification and topic modeling were performed by using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). The model extracted topics from the reviews and used Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) to define the aspects of the topics to further enhance the analysis. For consistency and accuracy, the method included sentiment annotation by a human annotator. Methods: A total of two datasets were used in this research, with the first collected by scraping user reviews of Ride-Hailing App while the second was obtained from Kaggle, and to identify relevant topics, modeling was performed using LDA. These topics were then categorized into aspects using GenAI, covering areas, such as customer experience, service, payment, app features, task management, and event management. Subsequently, sentiment labeling was conducted using human annotators to provide a reliable baseline. BERT model was then used to classify sentiment with aspect hints, and the evaluation included calculations of accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. Results: The results showed that BERT model achieved the highest accuracy of 97% in sentiment analysis across all datasets. Conclusion: This research provided valuable understanding of user experience and established a strong ABSA framework for analyzing user reviews using LDA, Aspect Annotation, GenAI, and BERT sentiment models. Future research could expand this method to other app categories and incorporate real-time ABSA for continuous monitoring and dynamic feedback. Keywords: User Reviews, Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA), Sentiment Analysis, Topic Modeling, Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI)