Restaurant recommendation model using textual information to estimate consumer preference: evidence from an online restaurant platform

Abstract

Purpose

Textual information about restaurants, such as online reviews and food categories, is essential for consumer purchase decisions. However, previous restaurant recommendation studies have failed to use textual information containing essential information for predicting consumer preferences effectively. This study aims to propose a novel restaurant recommendation model to effectively estimate the assessment behaviors of consumers for multiple restaurant attributes.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors collected 1,206,587 reviews from 25,369 consumers of 46,613 restaurants from Yelp.com. Using these data, the authors generated a consumer preference vector by combining consumer identity and online consumer reviews. Thereafter, the authors combined the restaurant identity and food categories to generate a restaurant information vector. Finally, the nonlinear interaction between the consumer preference and restaurant information vectors was learned by considering the restaurant attribute vector.

Findings

This study found that the proposed recommendation model exhibited excellent performance compared with state-of-the-art models, suggesting that combining various textual information on consumers and restaurants is a fundamental factor in determining consumer preference predictions.

Originality/value

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to develop a personalized restaurant recommendation model using textual information from real-world online restaurant platforms. This study also presents deep learning mechanisms that outperform the recommendation performance of state-of-the-art models. The results of this study can reduce the cost of exploring consumers and support effective purchasing decisions.

研究目的

关于餐厅的文本信息, 如在线评论和食品分类, 对于消费者的购买决策产生至关重要。然而, 先前的餐厅推荐研究未能有效利这些文本信息去预测消费者喜好。本研究提出了一种新颖的餐厅推荐模型, 以有效估计消费者对多个餐厅属性的评估行为。

研究方法

我们从 Yelp.com 收集了来自25,369名消费者对 46,613 家餐厅的 1,206,587 条评论。利用这些数据, 我们通过结合消费者身份和在线消费者评论生成了消费者偏好向量。然后, 我们结合了餐厅身份和食品分类来生成餐厅信息向量。最后, 考虑到餐厅属性向量, 本研究调查了消费者偏好和餐厅信息向量之间的非线性交互关系。

研究发现

我们发现, 所提出的推荐模型相比于之前最先进的模型表现出更优秀的性能, 这表明结合消费者和餐厅的各种文本信息是预测消费者喜好的基本因素。

研究创新/价值

据我们所知, 这是第一项利用来自真实在线餐厅平台的文本信息开发个性化餐厅推荐模型的研究。本研究还提出了胜过最先进模型的深度学习机制。本研究的结果可以降低探索消费者行为的成本并支持有效的购买决策。

Citation

Li, Q., Jang, D., Kim, D. and Kim, J. (2023), "Restaurant recommendation model using textual information to estimate consumer preference: evidence from an online restaurant platform", Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Technology, Vol. 14 No. 5, pp. 857-877. https://doi.org/10.1108/JHTT-01-2023-0019