Making Sense of Fashion Feedback : Comparing Two Popular Text Analysis Tools

Abstract

The rapid expansion of the fashion industry, propelled by digital technology and e-commerce, has resulted in a significant volume of customer-generated reviews. These reviews serve as a valuable source for understanding customer satisfaction and behavior. This study aims to (1) analyze customer sentiment, (2) predict product recommendations, and (3) examine the relationship between sentiment classification and recommendation decisions using text embeddings from Word2Vec and GloVe. The research utilized over 23,000 fashion product reviews sourced from Kaggle. Text data were preprocessed and vectorized using Word2Vec and GloVe, followed by classification and prediction tasks using six machine learning models: Random Forest, SVM, Naïve Bayes, LSTM, Logistic Regression, and Gradient Boosting. The results revealed that Word2Vec consistently outperformed GloVe across all models and tasks, with the Word2Vec-LSTM combination achieving the highest accuracy of 87.35% and F1 score of 92.35% in imbalanced data scenarios. Correlation analysis also confirmed a strong and statistically significant relationship between sentiment and recommendation labels, with Spearman’s Rho of 0.8340 and Kendall’s Tau of 0.8120. These findings suggest that high-quality sentiment representation can effectively support product recommendation systems. This study contributes to the understanding of embedding effectiveness in fashion-related text analysis and opens avenues for hybrid and transformer-based representations in future research.