Sentiment based Food Classification for Restaurant Business

Abstract

In this paper, we address the problem of classifying the restaurant reviews into different meal courses based on the review sentiments. Based on our survey, we observe that there are no works which focus on classifying the food items into different meal courses with top $\boldsymbol{n}$ food items under each course using restaurant reviews. Most of the works in literature address the issues like predicting the ratings of the restaurant or restaurant business strategies by considering various attributes of the restaurant. Thus, in this paper, we propose a sentiment based food classification framework consisting of two tasks, namely, sentiment classification and four-course meal classification. In sentiment classification, we classify the reviews into positive and negative categories based on the sentiments of the reviews. In four-course meal classification, we categorize the reviews into four courses, namely, soups and salads, appetizers, main course and desserts. We list the top $\boldsymbol{n}$ food items liked by most of the customers in each of these courses. In order to select the suitable classification technique for addressing the identified problem, we analyze the learning curves based on the bias-variance trade-off. We observe that support vector machines (SVM) classification technique outperforms other techniques. The performance analysis of the proposed framework is carried out on the standard Yelp dataset. The top 5 food items obtained in each of the categories are soups and salads: salad, corn, coffee, cocktail, tea; appetizers: burger, pizza, bread, cheese, frie; main course: steak, meal, chicken, meat, beef; and desserts: doughnut, cream, cake, chocolate, flan.