Understanding Co-Working Space Users: Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

The rapid increase in popularity of co-working spaces, commonly used by freelancers and entrepreneurs, gives rise to the need to understand the requirements of their members. Benefits ranging from increased productivity and reduced commuting to cross disciplinary collaboration and networking are stated in the academic literature. A complementary perspective of whether their users agree with these benefits is gained by conducting an aspect-based sentiment analysis, topic modelling with Latent Dirichlet Allocation, and zero-shot text classification. This paper analyses almost 9,000 google reviews of 243 co-working spaces in the UK. The results show that the overall sentiment is positive with less than 7% negative or neutral reviews. The frequently mentioned topics include staff, the social and working atmosphere, community, food & drinks, location, and internet access.