Definition of customer requirements in big data using word vectors and affinity propagation clustering

Customer requirements (CRs) have a significant impact on product design. The existing methods of defining CRs, such as customer surveys and expert evaluations, are time-consuming, inaccurate and subjective. This paper proposes an automatic CRs definition method based on online customer product reviews using the big data analysis. Word vectors are defined using a continuous bag of words (CBOW) model. Online customer reviews are searched by a crawling method and filtered by the parts of speech and frequency of words. Filtered words are then clustered into groups by an affinity propagation (AP) clustering method based on trained word vectors. Exemplars in each clustering group are finally used to define CRs. The proposed method is verified by case studies of defining CRs for product design. Results show that the proposed method has better performance to determine CRs compared to existing CRs definition methods.