NLP: preparing data

In a sequence of articles we compare different NLP techniques to show you how we get valuable information from unstructured text. About a year ago we gathered reviews on Dutch restaurants. We were wondering whether ’the wisdom of the croud’ – reviews from restaurant visitors – could be used to predict which restaurants are most likely to receive a new Michelin-star. Read this post to see how that worked out. We used topic modeling as our primary tool to extract information from the review texts and combined that with predictive modeling techniques to end up with our predictions.