Understanding Users� Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems Vaping Experience from Social Media Using Sentiment Opinion Summarization Techniques (Preprint)

BACKGROUND E-liquid is one of the main components in electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS). ENDS review comments could serve as an early warning on use patterns, and even function to serve as an indicator of problems or adverse events pertaining to the use of specific e-liquids – much like the types of responses that are tracked by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regarding medications. OBJECTIVE This paper aims to understand users’ vaping experience using sentiment opinion summarization techniques, which can help characterize how consumers, ENDS vendors, and others think about specific e-liquids and their characteristic (e.g. flavor, throat hit, vapor production, etc.). METHODS We collected e-liquid reviews on JuiceDB from June 27, 2013 to December 31, 2017 by using its public application programming interface (API). The dataset contains 27070 reviews for 8058 e-liquid products. Each review is accompanied by an overall rating and a set of four aspect ratings of an e-liquid, each on a scale of 1-5: flavor accuracy, throat hit, value and cloud production. An Iterative Dichotomiser 3 (ID3) based influential aspect analysis model was adopted to learn the key elements that impact e-liquid use. Then, fine-grained sentiment analysis was employed to mine opinions on various aspects of the vaping experience related to e-liquids. RESULTS We found that: (1) Flavor accuracy and value were the two most important aspects that influence users’ sentiments towards e-liquids. (2) 67.83% (18362/27070) of the reviews in JuiceDB were positive, while 12.67% (3430/27070) were negative. This indicates that users generally hold positive attitudes towards e-liquids. (3) Among the nine flavors, fruity and sweet were the two most popular flavors. (4) Great and sweet tastes, reasonable value, and strong throat hit made users satisfied with the fruity and sweet flavors, whereas weird tastes made users dislike these flavors. Meanwhile, users complained about steep/expensive price, bad quality and harsh throat hit of some e-liquids. (5) There were 2342 fruity e-liquids and 2049 sweet e-liquids. Positive sentiments towards fruity e-liquids and sweet e-liquids measured 55.81% and 59.83% respectively; negative sentiments were 13.62% and 12.88% respectively. Great flavors and good vapors contributed to positive reviews of fruity and sweet products. However, bad tastes such as “sour” or “bitter” resulted in negative reviews. These findings can help businesses and policy makers further improve product quality and formulate effective policy. CONCLUSIONS This is the first study to provide an effective mechanism to analyze users’ ENDS vaping experience based on sentiment opinion summarization techniques. Sentiment opinions on aspect and products can be found using our method, which is of great importance to monitor e-liquid products and improve work efficiency.