Hierarchical Bayesian multi-kernel learning for integrated classification and summarization of app reviews

App stores enable users to share their experiences directly with the developers in the form of app reviews. Recent studies have shown that the feedback received from users is a valuable source of information for requirements extraction, which encourages app developers to leverage the reviews for app update and maintenance purposes. Follow-up studies proposed automated techniques to help developers filter the large volume of daily and noisy reviews and/or summarize their content. However, all previous studies approached the app reviews classification and summarization as separate tasks, which complicated the process and introduced unnecessary overhead. Moreover, none of those approaches explored the potential of utilizing the hierarchical relationships that exist between the labels of app reviews for the purpose of building a more accurate model. In this work, we propose Hierarchical Multi-Kernel Relevance Vector Machines (HMK-RVM), a Bayesian multi-kernel technique that integrates app review classification and summarization using a unified model. Moreover, it can provide insights into the learned patterns and underlying data for easier model interpretation. We evaluated our proposed approach on two real-world datasets and showed that in addition to the gained insights, the model produces equal or better results than the state of the art.