  Online reviews are an important source of feedback for understanding
customers. In this study, we follow novel approaches that target this absence
of actionable insights by classifying reviews as defect reports and requests
for improvement. Unlike traditional classification methods based on expert
rules, we reduce the manual labour by employing a supervised system that is
capable of learning lexico-semantic patterns through genetic programming.
Additionally, we experiment with a distantly-supervised SVM that makes use of
noisy labels generated by patterns. Using a real-world dataset of app reviews,
we show that the automatically learned patterns outperform the manually created
ones, to be generated. Also the distantly-supervised SVM models are not far
behind the pattern-based solutions, showing the usefulness of this approach
when the amount of annotated data is limited.
