Word Salad: Relating Food Prices and Descriptions

We investigate the use of language in food writing, specifically on restaurant menus and in customer reviews. Our approach is to build predictive models of concrete external variables, such as restaurant menu prices. We make use of a dataset of menus and customer reviews for thousands of restaurants in several U.S. cities. By focusing on prediction tasks and doing our analysis at scale, our methodology allows quantitative, objective measurements of the words and phrases used to describe food in restaurants. We also explore interactions in language use between menu prices and sentiment as expressed in user reviews.

[1]  Koert van Ittersum,et al.  Descriptive menu labels' effect on sales , 2001 .

[2]  Bing Liu,et al.  Mining Opinion Features in Customer Reviews , 2004, AAAI.

[3]  P. McCullagh.  Regression Models for Ordinal Data , 1980 .

[4]  Panagiotis G. Ipeirotis,et al.  Estimating the Helpfulness and Economic Impact of Product Reviews: Mining Text and Reviewer Characteristics , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.

[5]  Paul J. McVety,et al.  Fundamentals of Menu Planning , 1989 .

[6]  Panagiotis G. Ipeirotis,et al.  Show me the money!: deriving the pricing power of product features by mining consumer reviews , 2007, KDD '07.

[7]  Nicholas M. Kiefer,et al.  A demand-based approach to menu pricing , 1994 .

[8]  Eric P. Xing,et al.  Discovering Sociolinguistic Associations with Structured Sparsity , 2011, ACL.

[9]  Brendan T. O'Connor,et al.  A Latent Variable Model for Geographic Lexical Variation , 2010, EMNLP.

[10]  Brendan T. O'Connor,et al.  Predicting a Scientific Community’s Response to an Article , 2011, EMNLP.

[11]  Glenn Ellison,et al.  A Model of Add-On Pricing , 2003 .

[12]  Arnold M. Zwicky,et al.  AMERICA'S NATIONAL DISH: THE STYLE OF RESTAURANT MENUS , 1980 .

[13]  Fernando Pereira,et al.  Reading the Markets: Forecasting Public Opinion of Political Candidates by News Analysis , 2008, COLING.

[14]  Arun Sundararajan,et al.  Opinion Mining using Econometrics: A Case Study on Reputation Systems , 2007, ACL.

[15]  Dan Jurafsky,et al.  Authenticity in America: Class Distinctions in Potato Chip Advertising , 2011, Food and Culture.

[16]  M. Kasavana,et al.  Menu engineering: a practical guide to menu analysis. Rev. ed. , 1990 .

[17]  Jack E. Miller.  Menu Pricing & Strategy , 1996 .

[18]  Noah A. Smith,et al.  Predicting Risk from Financial Reports with Regression , 2009, NAACL.

[19]  Noah A. Smith,et al.  Movie Reviews and Revenues: An Experiment in Text Regression , 2010, NAACL.

[20]  Koert van Ittersum,et al.  How Descriptive Food Names Bias Sensory Perceptions in Restaurants , 2005 .

[21]  Moshe Koppel,et al.  Good News or Bad News? Let the Market Decide , 2006, Computing Attitude and Affect in Text.

[22]  Janyce Wiebe,et al.  Computing Attitude and Affect in Text: Theory and Applications , 2005, The Information Retrieval Series.