Dan Jurafsky, Stanford University – The Language of Reviews

Reading online reviews of a restaurant before heading out for a meal is commonplace in today’s digital world.

In a recent study, Dan Jurafsky, a linguist at Stanford University, has found some common tropes present in many online reviews.

Dan Jurafsky is Professor of Linguistics at Stanford University. In addition to his work on the linguistics of food, his research ranges broadly across computational linguistics, with special emphasis on the extraction of meaning from text and speech, on the processing of Chinese, and on applications to the behavioral and social sciences and the humanities. He is the co-author of the widely-used textbook Speech and Language Processing, co-created one of the first massively open online courses, Stanford’s online course in Natural Language Processing, is a former fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.

Dr. Jurafsky’s study was co-authored by Victor Chahuneau, Bryan R. Routledge, and Noah A. Smith of Carnegie Mellon University.

Dan Jurafsky – The Language of Reviews

The words you use when you write a restaurant review on the web say as much about your own psychology as they do about which dish to order.

In a recent study we used computational linguistics to examine a million reviews on the web and found that when people write a 1-star review, they use the language of trauma: precisely the same words used by people writing about tragedies like the deaths of loved ones, for instance the pronoun “we” to emphasize a collective sense of grief and solidarity. These terrible reviews are caused by bad customer service rather than just bad food or atmosphere, demonstrating that our perceptions are inextricably colored by face-to-face interactions.

Reviews of expensive restaurants relied on complex words like “sumptuous,” “unobtrusively”, and “vestibule” to craft the image of the reviewer as well educated or sophisticated. We eat high-class food not only because it takes good, but also to signal that we’re high-class too, and the language goes along with it.

Positive reviews of expensive restaurants use metaphors of sex and sensual pleasure, such as “orgasmic pastry” or “seductively seared foie gras”, demonstrating our sensuous, hedonistic nature. But positive reviews of cheap restaurants and foods instead employed metaphors of drugs or addiction: “these cupcakes are like crack,” and “the wings are addicting”.

Why the difference?

We’re embarrassed about eating french fries and chocolate. Foods that we “crave” aren’t vegetables.

We talk about food as an addiction when we’re feeling guilty. By placing the blame on the food we’re distancing ourselves from our own “sin” of eating fried or sugary snacks. In fact, women are more likely than men to use these drug metaphors, suggesting that they are especially pressured to conform by healthy or low-calorie eating.

When you write a review on the web you’re providing a window into your own psyche – and the vast amount of text on the web means that researchers have millions of pieces of data to help better understand the human experience of the world.