ABSTRACT
During the COVID-19 crisis, customers' preference in having food delivered to their doorstep instead of waiting in a restaurant has propelled the growth of food delivery services (FDSs). With all restaurants going online and bringing FDSs onboard, such as UberEATS, Menulog or Deliveroo, customer reviews on online platforms have become an important source of information about the company's performance. FDS organisations aim to gather complaints from customer feedback and effectively use the data to determine the areas for improvement to enhance customer satisfaction. This work aimed to review machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models and explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) methods to predict customer sentiments in the FDS domain. A literature review revealed the wide usage of lexicon-based and ML techniques for predicting sentiments through customer reviews in FDS. However, limited studies applying DL techniques were found due to the lack of the model interpretability and explainability of the decisions made. The key findings of this systematic review are as follows: 77% of the models are non-interpretable in nature, and organisations can argue for the explainability and trust in the system. DL models in other domains perform well in terms of accuracy but lack explainability, which can be achieved with XAI implementation. Future research should focus on implementing DL models for sentiment analysis in the FDS domain and incorporating XAI techniques to bring out the explainability of the models.
ABSTRACT
The demand for food delivery services (FDSs) during the COVID-19 crisis has been fuelled by consumers who prefer to order meals online and have it delivered to their door than to wait at a restaurant. Since many restaurants moved online and joined FDSs such as Uber Eats, Menulog, and Deliveroo, customer reviews on internet platforms have become a valuable source of information about a company's performance. FDS organisations strive to collect customer complaints and effectively utilise the information to identify improvements needed to enhance customer satisfaction. However, only a few customer opinions are addressed because of the large amount of customer feedback data and lack of customer service consultants. Organisations can use artificial intelligence (AI) instead of relying on customer service experts and find solutions on their own to save money as opposed to reading each review. Based on the literature, deep learning (DL) methods have shown remarkable results in obtaining better accuracy when working with large datasets in other domains, but lack explainability in their model. Rapid research on explainable AI (XAI) to explain predictions made by opaque models looks promising but remains to be explored in the FDS domain. This study conducted a sentiment analysis by comparing simple and hybrid DL techniques (LSTM, Bi-LSTM, Bi-GRU-LSTM-CNN) in the FDS domain and explained the predictions using SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) and Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME). The DL models were trained and tested on the customer review dataset extracted from the ProductReview website. Results showed that the LSTM, Bi-LSTM and Bi-GRU-LSTM-CNN models achieved an accuracy of 96.07%, 95.85% and 96.33%, respectively. The model should exhibit fewer false negatives because FDS organisations aim to identify and address each and every customer complaint. The LSTM model was chosen over the other two DL models, Bi-LSTM and Bi-GRU-LSTM-CNN, due to its lower rate of false negatives. XAI techniques, such as SHAP and LIME, revealed the feature contribution of the words used towards positive and negative sentiments, which were used to validate the model.
ABSTRACT
During the COVID-19 crisis, customers' preference in having food delivered to their doorstep instead of waiting in a restaurant has propelled the growth of food delivery services (FDSs). With all restaurants going online and bringing FDSs onboard, such as UberEATS, Menulog or Deliveroo, customer reviews on online platforms have become an important source of information about the company's performance. FDS organisations aim to gather complaints from customer feedback and effectively use the data to determine the areas for improvement to enhance customer satisfaction. This work aimed to review machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models and explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) methods to predict customer sentiments in the FDS domain. A literature review revealed the wide usage of lexicon-based and ML techniques for predicting sentiments through customer reviews in FDS. However, limited studies applying DL techniques were found due to the lack of the model interpretability and explainability of the decisions made. The key findings of this systematic review are as follows: 77% of the models are non-interpretable in nature, and organisations can argue for the explainability and trust in the system. DL models in other domains perform well in terms of accuracy but lack explainability, which can be achieved with XAI implementation. Future research should focus on implementing DL models for sentiment analysis in the FDS domain and incorporating XAI techniques to bring out the explainability of the models.