Harvesting Creative Templates for Generating Stylistically Varied Restaurant Reviews
Table 1: Restaurant Reviews by Rating from the Yelp Dataset Challenge Corpus
['[BOLD] #', '[BOLD] Stars', '[BOLD] Review']
The restaurant domain has been one of the most common applications for spoken dialogue systems for at least 25 years Given this, it is surprising that previous work has not especially noted that restaurant reviews are a fertile source of creative and figurative language. For example, consider the elaborate descriptions in the restaurant reviews in Table , e.g. phrases such as worst thing that ever happened in the history of the known world along with incredibly remarkably terrible (Row 1), eat here everyday if I didn’t think I’d end up 400 pounds and sooooooo heavenly (Row 4), and food so amazing you cannot eat […] anywhere else (Row 5). These phrases express extremely valenced reactions to restaurants, their menu items, and related attributes, using figurative language. Hyperbole moves the strength of a statement up and down the scale, away from the literal meaning, where the degree of movement reflects the degree of contrast or exaggeration. Depending on what they modify, adverbial intensifiers like totally, absolutely, and incredibly can shift the strength of the assertion to extreme negative or positive. or ”That was simply the most incredible dining experience in my entire life.”