Very quaffable and great fun: Applying NLP to wine reviews

Abstract

We automatically predict properties of wines on the basis of smell and flavor descriptions from experts' wine reviews. We show wine experts are capable of describing their smell and flavor experiences in wine reviews in a sufficiently consistent manner, such that we can use their descriptions to predict properties of a wine based solely on language. The experimental results show promising F-scores when using lexical and semantic information to predict the color, grape variety, country of origin, and price of a wine. This demonstrates, contrary to popular opinion, that wine experts' reviews really are informative.