Where to Eat? An Automatic Summarization System for Opinions in Restaurant Reviews

Abstract

Technology has been an essential part of our lives. When going out to a new restaurant or cafe, people usually use websites or applications to lookup nearby places and then select one based on average rating. However, the average rating is sometimes not enough to predict the quality of the restaurant as people have different perspectives and priorities when evaluating a restaurant. In this paper, a summarization system for opinions in restaurant reviews is proposed. The system is a helpful tool for users on-the-go to help them make better judgments about the quality of a restaurant while saving their time. This is done by automatically and quickly providing the users with a summary of the opinions in the restaurant’s reviews. The proposed summarization system has been implemented in a mobile location-based application for Arabic restaurant reviews and it achieved a high usability score.