Great Food, Lousy Service: Topic Modeling for Sentiment Analysis in Sparse Reviews

One star for “Service,” but “They never disappoint!”? Does this guy have incredibly low expectations for being waited on or what! “Great food, lousy service, but hey, we love the place!” Or at least this is what the ratings seem to say. Still, even this reasonable prose reconciliation of the disparate topic scores is not at all what’s explicitly in the text, just “They never disappoint!” In fact, the text doesn’t speak to the topic ratings at all. Such, it seems, are among the multiple challenges of attempting Sentiment Analysis (SA) with data from OpenTable.com, a web-based restaurant reservation and rating service.