Objective and neutral summarization of customer reviews

Opinion mining aims to detect and extract relevant information from large quantity of customer reviews. Automatic opinion summarization then seeks to create a consensual point of view often oriented toward the main sentiment of clients to render their experience. Although factual information is valuable for companies to understand what works or not in their products, summarization approaches that convey objectivity, and constructive feedback from customer reviews have yet to be explored. We propose an adversarial multi-task learning model for document summarization to address this new issue. Our algorithm combines an autoencoder for document summarization with a gradient reversal layer to learn independent representations of subjective and sentiment-based material. We assess and compare our method on the Amazon product review dataset where we introduce an original evaluation dataset for objective summarization. We further completed the analysis with neutrality and objectivity metrics. This study demonstrates that the generated summaries carry out relevant and objective content but also emphasize the importance of various processes and layers in multi-task learners to control the information effectively.