Mining online e-liquid reviews for opinion polarities about e-liquid features

BACKGROUND: In recent years, the emerging electronic cigarette (e-cigarette) marketplace has developed prosperously all over the world. By analyzing online e-liquid reviews, we seek to identify the features attracting users. METHODS: We collected e-liquid reviews from one of the largest online e-liquid review websites and extracted the e-liquid features by keywords. Then we used sentiment analysis to classify the features into two polarities: positive and negative. The positive sentiment ratio of a feature reflects the e-cigarette users’ preference on this feature. RESULTS: The popularity and preference of e-liquid features are not correlated. Nuts and cream are the favorite flavor categories, while fruit and cream are the most popular categories. The top mixed flavors are preferable to single flavors. Fruit and cream categories are most frequently mixed with other flavors. E-cigarette users are satisfied with cloud production, but not satisfied with the ingredients and throat hit. CONCLUSIONS: We identified the flavors that e-cigarette users were satisfied with, and we found the users liked e-cigarette cloud production. Therefore, flavors and cloud production are potential factors attracting new users.