Categorizing food names in restaurant reviews

There are many aspects such as food, service, and ambience that a customer would look for, when deciding on a restaurant to dine in. Among these aspects, the type of food it sells and the food quality are the most important. Therefore, when automatically rating restaurants based on customer reviews, the food aspect plays a major role. There exists some research on rating individual food items in a restaurant. However, a potential customer requires not the ranking of an individual food item, but the ranking of a particular food category in general. In order to do that, a categorization of food names is required. This paper presents two techniques for food name categorization using document similarity measurements.