Mining and Exploring Unstructured Customer Feedback Data Using Language Models and Treemap Visualizations

We propose an approach for exploring large corpora of textual customer feedback in a guided fashion, bringing order to massive amounts of unstructured information. The prototypical system we implemented allows an analyst to assess labelled clusters in a graphical fashion, based on treemaps, and perform drill-down operations to investigate the topic of interest in a more fine-grained manner. Labels are chosen by simple but effective term weighting schemes and lay the foundations for assigning feedback postings to clusters. In order to allow for drill-down operations leading to new clusters of refined information, we present an approach that contrasts foreground and background models of feedback texts when stepping into the currently selected set of feedback messages. The prototype we present is already in use at various Siemens units and has been embraced by marketing analysts.