Peer Review History

Original SubmissionNovember 2, 2022
Decision Letter - Viacheslav Kovtun, Editor

PONE-D-22-30174Analysis of Dating Apps' User Reviews Based on Text MiningPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Chen,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

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Kind regards,

Viacheslav Kovtun, Dr.Sc., Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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"The work was financialy supported by Chinese National Natural Science Foundation with Grant No.12101473, the Basic Research Program of Natural Science in Shaanxi Province with Grant Nos.2021JQ-764 and 2021JQ-766, and Education Department of Shaanxi Province with Grant No.21JK0640."

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Please remove any funding-related text from the manuscript and let us know how you would like to update your Funding Statement. Currently, your Funding Statement reads as follows: 

"Xi Chen was financialy supported by Chinese National Natural Science Foundation with Grant No.12101473, the Basic Research Program of Natural Science in Shaanxi Province with Grant Nos.2021JQ-764 and 2021JQ-766, and Education Department of Shaanxi Province with Grant No.21JK0640.

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7. We note you have included a table to which you do not refer in the text of your manuscript. Please ensure that you refer to Table 1 in your text; if accepted, production will need this reference to link the reader to the Table. 

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: It's possible that I'll suggest giving this article a presentation at a conference so that You may have an audience and continue the conversation about the issues. My primary justification is on the fact that "users" are the "unit of analysis" linked with this study; hence, there needs to be a concrete subjective evaluation to generate an accurate construct that is suitable for quantifying the impact of "User Reviews." However, while employing machine learning, the assumption is that a new course of action "or knowledge" can emerge from the analysis of the machine learning, sadly the work has not showed any improvement on the problems linked with "User Reviews" on dating apps. Generally speaking, user-based aspects used in this study is faulty.

You don't need any sort of conceptualised form of an advanced thought in order to gain something new through "Negative Review Mining." Instead, all you need is to have an open mind.

To begin, you have to get a firm grasp on the fact that ratings and reviews are inextricably linked, and it is your responsibility to ensure that this connection is maintained.

The users review and rating is important because it has led to understanding of the rating approached mapped to reviews.

Rating is numeric and reviews are reflections. The numeric values of rating will indicate if DATIN APPS is Good or BAD, whereas reviews will indicate the user’s perceptions. Previous research reveals that “Bad ratings are trustworthy regardless of the number of reviews”, that is users tend to believe reported bad rating. On the other hand, “Good ratings are trustworthy only when they come along with a high number of reviews”

The proposed four facets of "bad reviews of users" are not utilised in any novel way by Section 3, which does not produce anything that is formulated.

The fourth section is a routine analysis, and it does not introduce anything novel that contributes to the advancement of the research field. The XGBoost and LightGBM models are applied to the dataset that is already in existence without any additional information being connected to them.

,

Reviewer #2: In this paper, the authors are proposed “Analysis of Dating Apps’ User Reviews Based on Text Mining”.

The strengths of the paper are that it is well structured, the description of the related work is well done and that results are extensively compared to results of the similar research.

Minor revisions:

1. Authors should draw a graphical abstract of the proposed approach

2. Authors should mention the names of the all the six dating apps

3. Why authors used LDA instead of LSA.

4. Why authors used XGBoost justify it

5. Proofread the entire manuscript

6. Authors follow the recently published paper “Abdulkadhar, S., Murugesan, G., & Natarajan, J. (2020). Classifying protein-protein interaction articles from biomedical literature using many relevant features and context-free grammar. Journal of King Saud University-Computer and Information Sciences, 32(5), 553-560.”

7. Proofread the entire manuscript.

**********

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Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

**********

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Revision 1

#Responses to Academic Editor:

Thank you very much for your guidance and comments on our work. Please find our itemized responses below and our corrections in the re-submitted files.

1. Comments: Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf.

Response: We used the latex template provided by PLOS ONE for our writing and followed the format of the paper required by PLOS ONE.

2. Comments: In your Methods section, please include additional information about your dataset and ensure that you have included a statement specifying whether the collection method of the collected dataset, and its use for research, complied with the terms and conditions for the website.

Response: We have uploaded the dataset to figshare.com and made it publicly available, referenced the dataset in the Data Acquisition section of the article, and added a statement of compliance with data collection. The URI of our data is:

https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/Text_of_user_reviews_of_dating_apps/21895827

3. Comments: Please note that PLOS ONE has specific guidelines on code sharing for submissions in which author-generated code and data that underpins the findings in the manuscript. In these cases, all author-generated code must be made available without restrictions upon publication of the work. Please review our guidelines at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/materials-and-software-sharing#loc-sharing-code and ensure that your code is shared in a way that follows best practice and facilitates reproducibility and reuse. New software must comply with the Open Source Definition. If data cannot be openly shared for ethical or legal restrictions, please provide details for accessing these data from the original data holder.

Response: The code we used has been publicly posted on GitHub, and the URL of the code (https://github.com/Qian0214Shen/code-of-text-mining-paper) has been filled in the relevant field when submitted.

4. Comments: Thank you for stating the following in the Acknowledgments Section of your manuscript:

"The work was financialy supported by Chinese National Natural Science Foundation with Grant No.12101473, the Basic Research Program of Natural Science in Shaanxi Province with Grant Nos.2021JQ-764 and 2021JQ-766, and Education Department of Shaanxi Province with Grant No.21JK0640."

We note that you have provided funding information that is not currently declared in your Funding Statement. However, funding information should not appear in the Acknowledgments section or other areas of your manuscript. We will only publish funding information present in the Funding Statement section of the online submission form.

Please remove any funding-related text from the manuscript and let us know how you would like to update your Funding Statement. Currently, your Funding Statement reads as follows:

"Xi Chen was financialy supported by Chinese National Natural Science Foundation with Grant No.12101473, the Basic Research Program of Natural Science in Shaanxi Province with Grant Nos.2021JQ-764 and 2021JQ-766, and Education Department of Shaanxi Province with Grant No.21JK0640.

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript."

Please include your amended statements within your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf..

Response: We have removed the section on funding information from the paper.

5. Comments: In your Data Availability statement, you have not specified where the minimal data set underlying the results described in your manuscript can be found. PLOS defines a study's minimal data set as the underlying data used to reach the conclusions drawn in the manuscript and any additional data required to replicate the reported study findings in their entirety. All PLOS journals require that the minimal data set be made fully available. For more information about our data policy, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability.

""Upon re-submitting your revised manuscript, please upload your study’s minimal underlying data set as either Supporting Information files or to a stable, public repository and include the relevant URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers within your revised cover letter. For a list of acceptable repositories, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-recommended-repositories. Any potentially identifying patient information must be fully anonymized.

Important: If there are ethical or legal restrictions to sharing your data publicly, please explain these restrictions in detail. Please see our guidelines for more information on what we consider unacceptable restrictions to publicly sharing data: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-unacceptable-data-access-restrictions. Note that it is not acceptable for the authors to be the sole named individuals responsible for ensuring data access.

We will update your Data Availability statement to reflect the information you provide in your cover letter.

Response: We have uploaded the dataset to figshare.com and made it publicly available, referenced the dataset in the Data Acquisition section of the article, and added a statement of compliance with data collection. The URI of our data is:

https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/Text_of_user_reviews_of_dating_apps/21895827

6. Comments: PLOS requires an ORCID iD for the corresponding author in Editorial Manager on papers submitted after December 6th, 2016. Please ensure that you have an ORCID iD and that it is validated in Editorial Manager. To do this, go to ‘Update my Information’ (in the upper left-hand corner of the main menu), and click on the Fetch/Validate link next to the ORCID field. This will take you to the ORCID site and allow you to create a new iD or authenticate a pre-existing iD in Editorial Manager. Please see the following video for instructions on linking an ORCID iD to your Editorial Manager account: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xcclfuvtxQ

Response: We have added ORCID information for the corresponding author in her account.

7. Comments: We note you have included a table to which you do not refer in the text of your manuscript. Please ensure that you refer to Table 1 in your text; if accepted, production will need this reference to link the reader to the Table

Response: We have already referenced Table 1 below it.

#Responses to Reviewer 1:

Thank you very much for taking your time to review this manuscript. Please find our itemized responses below.

1. Comments:  It's possible that I'll suggest giving this article a presentation at a conference so that You may have an audience and continue the conversation about the issues. My primary justification is on the fact that "users" are the "unit of analysis" linked with this study; hence, there needs to be a concrete subjective evaluation to generate an accurate construct that is suitable for quantifying the impact of "User Reviews." However, while employing machine learning, the assumption is that a new course of action "or knowledge" can emerge from the analysis of the machine learning, sadly the work has not showed any improvement on the problems linked with "User Reviews" on dating apps. Generally speaking, user-based aspects used in this study is faulty.

Response: The starting point of our research is based on the perspective of enterprise information management, that is, by mining the user reviews of the apps, analyzing how the operators of the apps can improve the apps based on the opinions of users, and trying to develop a method for the operators of the apps to quickly classify the unmarked user reviews collected. Regarding the impact of quantifying user reviews that you mentioned, this may require a large-scale market research to understand how a large number of users perceive these reviews in Google Play and how these reviews influence user choices. In fact, this is indeed a very interesting and exciting topic, and we hope to have the opportunity to collect more suitable data for such research in further research.

2. Comments: You don't need any sort of conceptualised form of an advanced thought in order to gain something new through "Negative Review Mining." Instead, all you need is to have an open mind.

Response: We strongly agree that an open mind is indeed a necessary condition for people to accept bad reviews, but in the current era of big data, it is difficult for app operators to rely only on an open mind to mine information from a large number of reviews. Therefore, we hope to efficiently mine information from massive user reviews by applying machine learning models.

3. Comments: Rating is numeric and reviews are reflections. The numeric values of rating will indicate if DATIN APPS is Good or BAD, whereas reviews will indicate the user’s perceptions. Previous research reveals that “Bad ratings are trustworthy regardless of the number of reviews”, that is users tend to believe reported bad rating. On the other hand, “Good ratings are trustworthy only when they come along with a high number of reviews”

Response: In the current reviews of apps, malicious low-scoring reviews or worthless reviews from bots are always inevitable, and these reviews are difficult to express the general thoughts of app users. There are other comments, perhaps due to their short publication time, that do not receive enough likes, and the value of these comments is difficult to determine in batches. Therefore, in order to control the mining value of the data and ensure that the size of data in the dataset is not too small to affect the fit of the machine learning model, we select comments with more than or equal to 5 likes for analysis.

4. Comments: The fourth section is a routine analysis, and it does not introduce anything novel that contributes to the advancement of the research field. The XGBoost and LightGBM models are applied to the dataset that is already in existence without any additional information being connected to them.

Response: We should admit that the fourth part of our study is only an application to existing methods. First of all, LightGBM and XGBoost are actually very good machine learning classification models and are widely used in machine learning research in various fields. And in the process of application, we obtained 88.3% good accuracy for machine learning classification tasks with 5 classes, which is close to 19% higher than our baseline model, so we think this result is acceptable.

#Responses to Reviewer 2:

Thank you very much for your guidance and comments on our work. Please find our itemized responses below and our corrections in the re-submitted files.

1. Comments: Authors should draw a graphical abstract of the proposed approach

Response: We have produced the Graphic Abstract and submitted it as an attachment.

2. Comments: Authors should mention the names of the all the six dating apps

Response: We have declared the names of 6 apps in the section of data acquisition in Page 4.

3. Comments: Why authors used LDA instead of LSA

Response: Comparing some previous studies, we think it is difficult to say which is better than LSA or LDA. But considering that LDA considers both the distribution of topics by document and the distribution of topics over LSA, we chose LDA, as detailed at the end of the first paragraph of section 3.1.

4. Comments: Why authors used XGBoost justify it

Response: In the process of application XGBoost, we obtained 88.3% good accuracy for machine learning classification tasks with 5 classes, which is close to 19% higher than our baseline model, so we think this result is acceptable.

5. Comments: Proofread the entire manuscript

Response: We have proofread the full text and corrected some grammatical errors.

6. Comments: Authors follow the recently published paper “Abdulkadhar, S., Murugesan, G., & Natarajan, J. (2020). Classifying protein-protein interaction articles from biomedical literature using many relevant features and context-free grammar. Journal of King Saud University-Computer and Information Sciences, 32(5), 553-560.”

Response: We have already referred to the paper you mentioned and cited it in the introduction section.

Attachments
Attachment
Submitted filename: Response to reviewers.pdf
Decision Letter - Viacheslav Kovtun, Editor

User Review Analysis of Dating Apps based on Text Mining

PONE-D-22-30174R1

Dear Dr. Chen,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org.

Kind regards,

Viacheslav Kovtun, Dr.Sc., Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Partly

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: After giving the piece my complete attention, I can say that the authors have addressed each and every one of my concerns.

**********

7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

**********

Formally Accepted
Acceptance Letter - Viacheslav Kovtun, Editor

PONE-D-22-30174R1

User Review Analysis of Dating Apps based on Text Mining

Dear Dr. Chen:

I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org.

If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org.

Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access.

Kind regards,

PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff

on behalf of

Professor Viacheslav Kovtun

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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