Sentiment Analysis based Multi-person Multi-criteria Decision Making Methodology: Using Natural Language Processing and Deep Learning for Decision Aid

Over time, different models have emerged to help us to solve DM problems. In particular, multi-person multi-criteria decision making (MpMcDM) models consider the evaluations of multiple experts to solve a decision situation analyzing all possible solution alternatives according to several criteria [45]. Computational DM process, as the human DM one, requires of useful, complete and insightful information for making the most adequate decision according to the input information. The input of DM models is usually a set of evaluations from the experts. They wish to express their evaluations in natural language, but raw text is not directly processed by DM models. Accordingly, several approaches are followed for asking and elaborating a computational representation of the evaluations, namely: (1) using a numerical representation of the evaluations [35] and (2) using a predefined set of linguistic terms [13]. These approaches for asking evaluations constrain the evaluative expressiveness of the experts, because they have to adapt their evaluation to the numerical or linguistic evaluation alternatives. We claim that experts in a DM problem have to express their evaluations in natural language, and the DM model has to be able to process and computationally represent them. Natural language processing (NLP) is the artificial intelligence area that combines linguistic and computational language backgrounds for understanding and generating human language [16, 28].