Identifying Purchase Intent from Social Posts

Authors

  • Vineet Gupta Adobe Research India Labs, Adobe Systems
  • Devesh Varshney Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee
  • Harsh Jhamtani Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee
  • Deepam Kedia Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur
  • Shweta Karwa Indian Institute of Technology Delhi

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v8i1.14505

Keywords:

Social Media, Purchase Intent, Intention Analysis, Consumption Intent

Abstract

In present times, social forums such as Quora and Yahoo! Answers constitute powerful media through which people discuss on a variety of topics and express their intentions and thoughts. Here they often reveal their potential intent to purchase - 'Purchase Intent' (PI). A purchase intent is defined as a text expression showing a desire to purchase a product or a service in future. Extracting posts having PI from a user's social posts gives huge opportunities towards web personalization, targeted marketing and improving community observing systems. In this paper, we explore the novel problem of detecting PIs from social posts and classifying them. We find that using linguistic features along with statistical features of PI expressions achieves a significant improvement in PI classification over 'bag-of-words' based features used in many present day social-media classification tasks. Our approach takes into consideration the specifics of social posts like limited contextual information, incorrect grammar, language ambiguities, etc. by extracting features at two different levels of text granularity - word and phrase based features and grammatical dependency based features. Apart from these, the patterns observed in PI posts help us to identify some specific features.

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Published

2014-05-16

How to Cite

Gupta, V., Varshney, D., Jhamtani, H., Kedia, D., & Karwa, S. (2014). Identifying Purchase Intent from Social Posts. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 8(1), 180-186. https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v8i1.14505