The results indicate flavors and cloud production are the attractive features of e-liquid. This paper reveals the favorite flavor lists and the attitudes towards e-liquid ingredients, cloud production and throat hit based on the analysis of e-liquid reviews. We distinguished preference from popularity in the analysis of e-liquid: popularity is how often the e-cigarette users discuss about specific e-liquid features, but preference is whether the users like the e-liquid features and measured by positive sentiment ratio in our study. Despite the growing amount of literature on e-cigarettes on YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, online forums and multiple platforms, there are no published studies that have systematically summarized and analyzed the popularity and preference of e-liquid features based on online review websites. There is little research about other e-liquid features and users’ attitudes towards them. However, currently we only have information on the popularity of flavors, not the users’ attitudes towards different flavors in a fine-grained flavor analysis. Therefore, e-cigarette flavors have become one of the FDA’s concerns because of the influence on youth adoption and disease susceptibility. Tobacco companies have already successfully applied flavor varieties to the marketing of traditional tobacco products to young people, which resulted in banning cigarette flavors except for menthol. Fruit flavors are the most popular among users, while tobacco flavors are preferred for initial e-cigarette use among current smokers. Prior studies identified flavor as a factor that is attractive to e-cigarette adopters.
The rich information in the review data and advanced sentiment analytics have made mining and summarizing e-cigarette information from the unstructured texts possible. Different from the posts from other mainstream social media like Twitter and Reddit, JuiceDB posts are more focused on the e-liquid features. JuiceDB is one of the world’s largest review websites of e-liquid. E-liquid is the liquid mix used in e-cigarette kits to produce the smoke and cloud. In this paper, we seek to identify what e-cigarette features attract consumers based on the feature-level sentiment analysis of online e-liquid reviews. On the other hand, young people could get addicted to the nicotine in many e-cigarettes, which could result in the adoption of other tobacco products like regular cigarettes. On one hand, e-cigarette products usually contain less harmful chemicals than regular cigarettes and are regarded as an efficient method for tobacco consumption reduction and abstinence. Previous research has reached mixed conclusions regarding the benefits or risks of e-cigarettes. Therefore, flavors and cloud production are potential factors attracting new users.Į-cigarette usage has been increasing rapidly, but it is still a controversial product. We identified the flavors that e-cigarette users were satisfied with, and we found the users liked e-cigarette cloud production. E-cigarette users are satisfied with cloud production, but not satisfied with the ingredients and throat hit. Fruit and cream categories are most frequently mixed with other flavors. The top mixed flavors are preferable to single flavors. Nuts and cream are the favorite flavor categories, while fruit and cream are the most popular categories. The popularity and preference of e-liquid features are not correlated.
The positive sentiment ratio of a feature reflects the e-cigarette users’ preference on this feature.
Then we used sentiment analysis to classify the features into two polarities: positive and negative. We collected e-liquid reviews from one of the largest online e-liquid review websites and extracted the e-liquid features by keywords. By analyzing online e-liquid reviews, we seek to identify the features attracting users. In recent years, the emerging electronic cigarette (e-cigarette) marketplace has developed prosperously all over the world.