Extraction of Food-Related Onomatopoeia from Food Reviews and its Application to Restaurant Search

Onomatopoeia has been widely used recently in food reviews about food or restaurants. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a method to automatically extract onomatopoeia including unknown ones from food reviews sites. From the evaluation result, we found that it is able to extract onomatopoeia for specific foods with more than 46% precision; the method found 18 new unknown food-related onomatopoeias, i.e., not registered in an existing onomatopoeia dictionary, and in 62 extracted onomatopoeias. In addition, we propose a system that can present the user with a list of onomatopoeia specific to a restaurant she/he is interested in. The evaluation results indicate that an intuitive restaurant search can be done via a list of onomatopoeia, and that they are helpful for selecting food or restaurants.