Sentiment and Emotion-aware Multi-criteria Fuzzy Group Decision Making System

In today's world, making decisions as a group is common, whether choosing a restaurant or deciding on a holiday destination. Group decision-making (GDM) systems play a crucial role by facilitating consensus among participants with diverse preferences. Discussions are one of the main tools people use to make decisions. When people discuss alternatives, they use natural language to express their opinions. Traditional GDM systems generally require participants to provide explicit opinion values to the system. However, in real-life scenarios, participants often express their opinions through some text (e.g., in comments, social media, messengers, etc.). This paper introduces a sentiment and emotion-aware multi-criteria fuzzy GDM system designed to enhance consensus-reaching effectiveness in group settings. This system incorporates natural language processing to analyze sentiments and emotions expressed in textual data, enabling an understanding of participant opinions besides the explicit numerical preference inputs. Once all the experts have provided their preferences for the alternatives, the individual preferences are aggregated into a single collective preference matrix. This matrix represents the collective expert opinion regarding the other options. Then, sentiments, emotions, and preference scores are inputted into a fuzzy inference system to get the overall score. The proposed system was used for a small decision-making process - choosing the hotel for a vacation by a group of friends. Our findings demonstrate that integrating sentiment and emotion analysis into GDM systems allows everyone's feelings and opinions to be considered during discussions and significantly improves consensus among participants.