Behind the ratings: Text mining of restaurants customers' online reviews

Susan (Sixue) Jia

Establishing the relation between online ratings and reviews provides a potentially inexpensive and effective way for restaurants to capture quality improvement hints from customers.

Introduction

Restaurants are constantly seeking paths toward quality improvement. Online UGC (user-generated content) provides a potentially inexpensive and effective way for restaurants to capture quality improvement hints from customers. The two most typical forms of online UGC are ratings and reviews (Tang & Guo, 2015). Rating, usually based on a 5-point scale, is a straightforward indicator of a restaurant's single-time or average-over-time performance. Rating quantitatively manifests whether and to what extent a customer is satisfied with the restaurant. Because rating data are structured, they can easily be processed using statistical tools (Hardt, Varbanov, & Allenby, 2016; Kuksov&Xie, 2010).

Review, on...

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