A Phrase-Level User Requests Mining Approach in Mobile Application Reviews: Concept, Framework, and Operation

Abstract

Mobile application (app) reviews are feedback about experiences, requirements, and issues raised after users have used the app. The iteration of an app is driven by bug reports and user requirements analyzed and extracted from app reviews, which is a problem that app designers and developers are committed to solving. However, a great number of app reviews vary in quality and reliability. It is a difficult and time-consuming challenge to analyze app reviews using manual methods. To address this, a novel approach is proposed as an automated method to predict high priority user requests with fourteen extracted features. A semi-automated approach is applied to annotate requirements with high or low priority with the help of app changelogs. Reviews from six apps were retrieved from the Apple App Store to evaluate the feasibility of the approach and interpret the principles. The performance comparison results of the approach greatly exceed the IDEA method, with an average precision of 75.4% and recall of 70.4%. Our approach can be applied to specific app development to assist app developers in quickly locating user requirements and implement app maintenance and evolution.

Keywords

• app reviews
• user requests
• request priority
• sentiment analysis