Exploring Key Issues Affecting African Mobile eCommerce Applications Using Sentiment and Thematic Analysis

To analyze public perceptions of over-the-counter (OTC) hearing aids through sentiment and thematic analysis of online consumer reviews and their changes over time. Sentiment and thematic analysis. Online reviews from third-party and product websites. All English online consumer reviews posted between 2016 and 2024 for OTC hearing aids (83 models) were recorded (n = 21,727). Sentiment analysis was performed using Valence Aware Dictionary and Sentiment Reasoner (VADER), a rule-based sentiment analysis tool incorporating natural language processing. VADER provides scores for each review ranging from -1 (most negative), 0 (neutral), to 1 (most positive). Additional thematic analysis was performed for the top 100 most positive, neutral, and negative reviews (n = 300). Overall, mean (SD) VADER sentiment score of online reviews was generally positive at 0.587 (0.411). Multivariable regression analysis showed that higher VADER scores were associated with higher-priced and behind-the-ear (BTE) type hearing aids. Although there was a significant increase in a number of reviews after the Food and Drug Administration's new establishment of the OTC hearing aid category in 2022, the mean sentiment scores slightly decreased (β =-.10, [95%CI: -0.12 to -0.09]). Thematic analysis revealed that positive sentiments highlighted the affordability and time-saving benefits of OTC hearing aids as alternatives to prescription models. Negative sentiments centered on sound quality, challenges with customer service, and inadequate amplification for those with severe hearing loss. Customers generally viewed OTC hearing aids positively, while mixed experiences were present. When used as indicated for adults with mild to moderate hearing loss, OTC hearing aids may offer a viable alternative to prescription devices, improving accessibility and affordability.

Sentiment Analysis is a method to identify, extract, and quantify people's feelings, opinions, or attitudes. The wealth of online data motivates organizations to keep tabs on customers' opinions and feelings by turning to sentiment analysis tasks. Along with the sentiment analysis, the emotion analysis of written reviews is also essential to improve customer satisfaction with restaurant service. Due to the availability of massive online data, various computerized methods are proposed in the literature to decipher text sentiments. The majority of current methods rely on machine learning, which necessitates the pre-training of large datasets and incurs substantial space and time complexity. To address this issue, we propose a novel unsupervised sentiment classification model. This study presents an unsupervised mathematical optimization framework to perform sentiment and emotion analysis of reviews. The proposed model performs two tasks. First, it identifies a review's positive and negative sentiment polarities, and second, it determines customer satisfaction as either satisfactory or unsatisfactory based on a review. The framework consists of two stages. In the first stage, each review's context, rating, and emotion scores are combined to generate performance scores. In the second stage, we apply a non-cooperative game on performance scores and achieve Nash Equilibrium. The output from this step is the deduced sentiment of the review and the customer's satisfaction feedback. The experiments were performed on two restaurant review datasets and achieved state-of-the-art results. We validated and established the significance of the results through statistical analysis. The proposed model is domain and language-independent. The proposed model ensures rational and consistent results.

In natural language processing (NLP), Sentiment analysis is flourishing rapidly as it aims at finding the emotional tone behind a piece of text and helps in understanding the attitudes, opinions, and emotions expressed within an online mention. The internet is flooded with large amounts of data such as texts, photos, audio, and video. With the help of sentiment analysis, we can find useful information from this data. This paper presents various approaches in sentiment analysis used by researchers and the major challenges faced in this field. By analyzing different papers, we came to know that the most widely used techniques in machine learning are Naïve Bayes and SVM and in NLP, the lexicon-based approach is used. With the advancement in technology, sentiment analysis will be available for the public and smaller companies as well.

Recent technological advancement has made mobile commerce applications a sustainable business tool due to the capability of providing long-term economic growth without negatively impacting the community’s social, environmental, and cultural aspects. Nonetheless, the attention paid to mobile commerce’s role in facilitating firms’ economic growth among Malaysian entrepreneurs has been barely noticeable. Most entrepreneurs are not convinced to transform their main business channels from conventional to online (mobile) modes due to the lack of financial information and awareness of environmental concerns. Therefore, this study aims to examine the financial performance and mobile transport usage trends of mobile commerce applications. A quantitative research design through an online survey was applied for data collection, with 380 samples were analysed using IBM SPSS Statistic 26. The study found that mobile commerce users (entrepreneurs) agree that there has been an increasing trend in the number of customers, sales revenue, and monthly profit, at 99.2%, 99.1% and 96.6%, respectively. The rising trend in financial performance proves that mobile commerce is vital for a firm’s economic growth. The study also showed that the frequency of mobile transport usage showed a decreasing trend at 27% once the mobile commerce application is actively used among entrepreneurs. The decreasing trend of mobile transport usage can reduce carbon dioxide emissions and minimize individual movement, benefiting the environment and society. Hence, the study can provide invaluable insights to entrepreneurs and escalate their confidence levels in using mobile commerce applications as their primary business channels. Technology engagement in businesses will help entrepreneurs sustain their businesses, spur innovation among sellers, stimulate social benefits, increase the economy, and reduce environmental damage in the long run. In conclusion, mobile commerce is an efficient technological advancement which contributes to firm and country sustainability.

This research applies sentiment analysis to understand user perceptions of the Access by KAI application, especially specific aspects such as speed, payment process, and user interface (UI/UX). User reviews are collected and processed through preprocessing stages, balancing using the SMOTE method, and classified using three machine learning algorithms, namely Support Vector Machine (SVM), Decision Tree, and Logistic Regression. The SVM model achieved the highest accuracy of 89.33%, followed by Logistic Regression at 88%, and Decision Tree at 86.67%. Precision, recall, and F1-scores for each model were also evaluated, showing strong performance in detecting negative sentiments but lower performance for neutral and positive sentiments. In addition, keyword-based analysis revealed that negative sentiment was most commonly found in the aspects of the payment process and speed. WordCloud visualization also strengthens the results by showing the dominance of negative words in user reviews. The results of this study provide important suggestions and input for application developers to improve aspects of the service that are considered less satisfactory by users. Thus, this study can be used as a practical guide in making strategic decisions to improve the quality of service and user satisfaction of the Access by KAI application.

Sentiment analysis plays a pivotal role in understanding the sentiments and opinions expressed in textual data, offering valuable insights into various domains, including tourism. In this study, we present a comprehensive review of sentiment analysis techniques applied to tourism reviews using machine learning algorithms. The abundance of user-generated content on tourism platforms has made sentiment analysis an indispensable tool for businesses and researchers alike. By leveraging machine learning algorithms, researchers can extract sentiments from vast amounts of textual data efficiently and accurately. This review outlines the key methodologies and approaches utilized in sentiment analysis of tourism reviews. It discusses preprocessing techniques such as text tokenization, stop-word removal, and stemming, which are crucial for preparing textual data for analysis. Furthermore, it examines various machine learning algorithms employed for sentiment classification, including Naive Bayes, Support Vector Machines, and Recurrent Neural Networks. Additionally, the review delves into feature extraction methods such as bag-of-words, TF-IDF, and word embeddings, highlighting their impact on sentiment analysis accuracy. Moreover, it explores the challenges and limitations associated with sentiment analysis in the tourism domain, such as sarcasm detection and language nuances.

The potential advantages of mobile commerce applications have been discussed extensively in the recent literature, with many industries offering mobile services. Examples from the financial sector include instant funds transfer (mobile banking) and share trading (mobile brokerage). Commuter services such as sending schedule change alerts or using a mobile phone to pay for parking have become widespread. Applications based on the location of the user (e.g., offering mobile coupons to customers in the vicinity of a shop or a restaurant) are also being trialled (Barnes, 2002; Siau, Lim, & Shen, 2001; Varshney, Vetter, & Kalakota, 2000). Despite the potential benefits (for example, improved customer service) mobile commerce applications have not been widely adopted across business sectors. Mobile banking illustrates the point: initially, seen as the “killer application” of mobile commerce (Kannan, Chang, & Whinston, 2001), it has now been termed a “dead end” (Semrau & Kraiss, 2001). It has also been classified as an application which has not yet matured (Mallat, Rooi, & Tuunainen, 2004). However, innovative applications continue to emerge, for example, breaking news alerts (CNN, n.d.), and a mobile tutoring service (Butte, 2004). It has become important therefore to identify the determinants of mobile commerce adoption and the emerging adoption patterns. A significant number of results in this area have been reported in the literature. Recent examples include studies of mobile services adoption in areas characterized by relatively high penetration of mobile devices—such as Denmark (Constantiou, Damsgaard, & Knutsen, 2004), Singapore (Samtani, Leow, Lim, & Goh, 2004), and Finland (Carlsson, Hyvonen, Repo, & Walden, 2005). The identified drivers and inhibitors of mobile commerce adoption can be broadly classified as factors related to mobile infrastructure access, and factors relating to perceived consumer value. This article proposes a mobile commerce reference model which incorporates both infrastructure access and customer value and can be used to formulate research questions related to mobile commerce adoption. The remainder of the article is organized as follows: first, mobile commerce is defined and compared to electronic commerce. The next section introduces a mobile commerce reference model and discusses mobile commerce adoption. The article continues with a review of future trends and a brief conclusion.

A machine learning-based sentiment analysis of online product reviews with a novel term weighting and feature selection approach

Sentiment analysis is a rapidly growing field of research due to the explosive growth in digital information. In the modern world of artificial intelligence, sentiment analysis is one of the essential tools to extract emotion information from massive data. Sentiment analysis is applied to a variety of user data from customer reviews to social network posts. To the best of our knowledge, there is less work on sentiment analysis based on the categorization of users by demographics. Demographics play an important role in deciding the marketing strategies for different products. In this study, we explore the impact of age and gender in sentiment analysis, as this can help e-commerce retailers to market their products based on specific demographics. The dataset is created by collecting reviews on books from Facebook users by asking them to answer a questionnaire containing questions about their preferences in books, along with their age groups and gender information. Next, the paper analyzes the segmented data for sentiments based on each age group and gender. Finally, sentiment analysis is done using different Machine Learning (ML) approaches including maximum entropy, support vector machine, convolutional neural network, and long short term memory to study the impact of age and gender on user reviews. Experiments have been conducted to identify new insights into the effect of age and gender for sentiment analysis.

A subfield of artificial intelligence is that of natural language processing and sentiment analysis. The interest in sentiment analysis has increased with the development of the internet and web 2.0. With sentiment analysis it is possible to analyse the sentiment or emotions of written communication through dictionary-based sentiment analysis or machine learning algorithms. However, sentiment analysis also holds the potential of supporting people with disadvantages in interpreting the nuances in written communication. One such group is autistic people. The aim of the study is to examine autistic peoples’ perceptions of important design factors and functionality for an application with sentiment analysis to support emotional navigation in written communication.
 This study has been conducted with the first steps of design science to outline the requirements of a potential application that can support autistic people to navigate the emotions in written communication with sentiment analysis. The problem to be addressed was identified through related research and one of authors’ own experience of navigating written communications with autism. The requirements for the application were the main focus for this study and has been the primarily concern for data collection. Data have been collected through semi-structured interviews with autistic people and analysed with thematic analysis.
 Results of the study provide several important recommendations for the design of applications with sentiment analysis to support autistic people navigate the emotions in written communication. The study further provides an understanding of autistic peoples’ needs when navigating written communication. These findings can be used by researchers and developers to design support-applications with autistic peoples’ needs in the centre. An interesting next step of research would be to develop a prototype with the findings of this study addressed in the application’s functionality and design, which could then be evaluated on a larger scale.

Nowadays, people find it easier to express opinions via social media-formally known as Web 2.0. Sentiment analysis is an essential field under natural language processing in Computer Science that deals with analyzing people's opinions on the subject matter and discovering the polarity they contain. These opinions could be processed in collective form (as a document) or segments or units as sentences or phrases. Sentiment analysis can be applied in education, research optimization, politics, business, education, health, science and so on, thus forming massive data that requires efficient tools and techniques for analysis. Furthermore, the standard tools currently used for data collection, such as online surveys, interviews, and student evaluation of teachers, limit respondents in expressing opinions to the researcher's surveys and could not generate huge data as Web 2.0 becomes bigger. Sentiment analysis techniques are classified into three (3): Machine learning algorithms, lexicon and hybrid. This study explores sentiment analysis of Web 2.0 for novice researchers to promote collaboration and suggest the best tools for sentiment data analysis and result efficiency. Studies show that machine learning approaches result in large data sets on document-level sentiment classification. In some studies, hybrid techniques that combine machine learning and lexicon-based performance are better than lexicon. Python and R programming are commonly used tools for sentiment analysis implementation, but SentimentAnalyzer and SentiWordnet are recommended for the novice.
 Keywords: Sentiment Analysis; Web 2.0; Applications; Tools; Novice

Aim/Purpose: Mobile commerce adoption is low in developing countries; hence, public servants may not consider mobile commerce and mobile payments. Understanding the factors that influence mobile commerce and mobile payments in their context will aid in promoting those services. Background: The study investigates the factors that influence public servants’ mobile commerce and mobile payments in Ghana. Hence, it provides some understanding of the various aspects of mobile commerce and mobile payments adoption, such as acceptance, use, and eventual adoption into the user’s daily life, and how that affects their behaviour. Methodology: The research was conducted by surveying the factors influencing public servants’ adoption of mobile commerce and payments in Ghana. A cross-sectional survey was undertaken to put the research model to the test to measure the constructs and their relationships. Contribution: The study confirmed previous findings and created a new conceptual model for mobile commerce and mobile payment adoption and usage in the Ghanaian context. Findings: The variables of performance expectancy, trust, and facilitating conditions have a significant positive influence on behavioural intention. The factors of effort expectation and social influence have a significant negative impact. Price value and perceived reliability are latent variables that do not affect behavioural intention. Behavioural intention and facilitating conditions significantly influence the actual use behaviour of mobile commerce and mobile payment users. Recommendations for Practitioners: Mobile commerce is emerging as a new mode of transactions, with firms providing enabling platforms for users. Mobile commerce could become the most acceptable application for the next generation of mobile platform applications. This study offers insights into the fluidity of the mobile environment, with implications that spell out what will be effective mobile commerce services that will continue to be relevant. Mobile applications are attractive to people because they provide a better user experience. These mobile applications have been optimised to provide a fast, easy and delightful experience. Mobile commerce and mobile payment service providers can attract and retain more users if attention is paid to performance expectancy, trust, and facilitating conditions since they influence individuals’ decisions to adopt. Mobile technology is almost ubiquitous, influencing both online sales and in-store sales. With the right mobile commerce platform and features, businesses can expect to increase in-store and online sales, catering to a more extensive clientele. Mobile devices are the primary means that most customers use to look up information about products they see in stores, such as product reviews and pricing options. This study indicates that mobile commerce service providers can achieve a more extensive customer base by promoting performance expectancy, trust, and behavioural intentions. Recommendation for Researchers: Despite the numerous studies in the mobile commerce literature, few have used integrated models of perceived reliability, trust, and price value or methods to evaluate these factors in the emerging mobile commerce industry. Also, it combines mobile commerce and mobile payments, which very few that we know of have done. Impact on Society: Ghana is already in a cash-lite economy. Thus, the study is appropriate with the result of trust being a significant factor. It implies that people will begin using mobile commerce and mobile payments with a bit of drive to bring about this drive quickly. Future Research: Future research could further test the adapted model with moderating factors of age, gender, and education to delve deeper into the complexities of mobile commerce and mobile payments.

As digital marketing is becoming more popular, the number of customer views on brands is increasing rapidly. This makes it harder for companies to assess their brand image or digitally market their products on the web. We present a lexicon-based approach to extracting sentiment and emotion from tweets for digital marketing purposes. We collect ten thousand tweets related to ten technology brands: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, GE, IBM, Intel, Facebook, Oracle and HP. We perform sentiment analysis using SentiWordNet while we detect emotions using the NRC Hashtag Emotion Lexicon. We compare and combine the scores obtained from the two lexicons into one result per tweet. We describe the execution process of our experiment and show that the accuracy of the combined approach of sentiment and emotion analysis is enhanced over the independent approaches of sentiment analysis or emotion analysis.

User reviews on gaming platforms such as Steam have become a crucial source of information for potential players before making purchasing decisions. Due to the varied nature of user opinions, sentiment analysis is essential for processing and interpreting these reviews. This study investigates the application of sentiment analysis to RPG game reviews on Steam, aiming to assist users by summarizing reviews through sentiment results and providing insights into the general perception of a game. To achieve this, the study applies sentiment analysis using Word2Vec and Support Vector Machine (SVM). It focuses on evaluating the impact of lemmatization during preprocessing and analyzing the performance of Word2Vec in sentiment classification. Word2Vec transforms review text into vector representations that capture semantic relationships, enhancing the model’s ability to understand context. Meanwhile, SVM is chosen as the classifier for its effectiveness in distinguishing between positive and negative reviews and handling high-dimensional data. The system developed uses Word2Vec with 300-dimensional vectors combined with an SVM Polynomial classifier, resulting in the best performance among the tested models. The final model achieves a macro-average F1-score of 88.6%, indicating a strong capability in accurately classifying sentiments in user reviews. These results highlight the potential of combining word embedding and machine learning techniques for analyzing sentiment in gaming platforms. Keywords: sentiment analysis, Word2Vec, SVM, Steam, RPG

This research focuses on sentiment analysis in the marketplace reviews in Google Play Store, a platform for downloading Android applications and providing reviews. Sentiment analysis is essential for understanding user responses to applications, particularly in the app marketplace. In this study, two machine learning algorithms, Naïve Bayes and Logistic Regression, are employed to classify user reviews. The application rating is used as a reference to determine the sentiment of each comment. The dataset is divided into two conditions: using 2 labels (positive & negative) and 3 labels (positive, neutral, & negative). The test results indicate that the highest performance is achieved by classifying with Logistic Regression on the Shopee dataset with 2 labels. The accuracy reaches 84.58%, precision reaches 84.66%, and recall reaches 84.63%. Additionally, the fastest processing time occurs when testing the Lazada 2-label dataset with Naïve Bayes, taking only 0.038 seconds. Overall, the research suggests that datasets with 2 labels tend to yield higher accuracy compared to datasets with 3 labels.