Mining a treasure trove of textual data

At OpenTable, our primary focus is to enable a magical dining experience. This involves not only helping the diner make an informed decision about where to dine next, but also to learn from the experience of the diner both during and after the dining event. Diner reviews contain invaluable information that can be used to make better recommendations by capturing the essence of a restaurant that is not immediately apparent from its metadata, and also to better gauge the reasons for a diner’s satisfaction or disappointment with a dining experience.

At OpenTable, We have been heavily invested in applying data science techniques to our vast corpus of reviews to enable such learnings. I delivered this talk at the TextByTheBay 2015 conference, and it provides an overview of where we are with our efforts. I would recommend that you explore the other talks in the conference to get a better understanding of how the industry is learning from text.