Proceeding of 2018 IEEE International Conference on Current Trends toward Converging Technologies, Coimbatore, India
Restaurant’s Feedback Analysis System using
Sentimental Analysis and Data Mining
Techniques
Atharva Patil
Information Technology Engineering
Sardar Patel Institute of
Technology
Mumbai, India
atharvapatil1996@gmail.com
Karan Bheda
Information Technology Engineering
Sardar Patel Institute of Technology
Mumbai, India
bhedakaran1@gmail.com
Abstract— There are many challenges faced by
restaurants of which getting honest feedbacks of the
services have been a huge challenge but it is equally
very important to remain on the top of the current
market. The current trend and fact are; people
express their honest sentiments through social media.
Hence, through this paper, we present a methodology
that will quell this challenge by performing
sentimental analysis on the feedbacks and determine
their polarity. Followed by clustering on the positive
and negative feedbacks obtained from the previous
process, to identify the broad topics of that
organization that the feedbacks target. This
summarization helps the restaurants to improve their
current processes based on the feedback received. The
feedbacks are collected from different sources to
suffice the needs.
Keywords—Data Mining, Clustering, Sentiments,
Feedback Analysis, Polarity, Natural Language
Processing.
I.INTRODUCTION
Social Media is being used today by all kinds of people
whether young or old, poor or rich. It has become a
platform for expressing your views towards a particular
topic or retrieve information from other posts available
online. People try to give their opinion regarding a
particular topic on social media without any hesitation
and are influenced by others. These opinions of people
can be considered in order to improvise services and take
action against wrong practises.
The sentiment is a feeling that expresses judgement,
978-1-5386-3702-9/18/$31.00 © 2018 IEEE
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Nishita S. Upadhyay
Information Technology Engineering
Sardar Patel Institute of Technology
Mumbai, India
nishita84@gmail.com
Rupali Sawant
Information Technology Department
Sardar Patel Institute of Technology
Mumbai, India
rupali_sawant@spit.ac.in
attitude or thought. Sentiment analysis, also known as
opinion mining, studies people‟s sentiments towards
certain entities. The internet is a resourceful place with
respect to sentiment information. From a user‟s
perspective, people are able to post their own content on
various social media, such as forums, micro-blogs, or
online social networking sites [1]. In this paper, we are
proposing analysis on the sentiment level.
Data mining is the process of identifying patterns within a
large amount of dataset to acquire useful information. It
requires the data to be consolidated in a data warehouse.
Various data mining algorithms are applied so as to find
out meaningful insights within the data. These insights are
used for taking timely and accurate decisions by various
companies, business process, market analysis, etc. Data
mining is also known as data discovery and knowledge
discovery [7].
In today's world feedbacks for restaurants are generally
posted on various social media platforms. These
feedbacks are generally posted by users on various social
media platforms expressing their views about the
restaurant's services. These user views can be used to
meet customer needs, the key aspect of any restaurant in
the competitive market. It is practically not possible for
restaurants to keep track and analyse all these feedbacks.
II.PROPOSED METHODOLOGY
Our methodology comprises of three sections –
Sentimental Analysis, Clustering the positive and the
negative feedbacks and Identifying the clustered
feedback‟s topics. These topics are discussed in detail in
the further sections.
1
 Proceeding of 2018 IEEE International Conference on Current Trends toward Converging Technologies, Coimbatore, India
Fig. 1: Operations performed in Sentimental Analysis
Sentimental analysis
Sentiment Analysis is a Natural Language Processing and
Information Extraction task that aims to obtain writer‟s
feelings expressed in positive or negative comments,
questions and requests, by analysing large numbers of
documents. Sentimental Analysis helps in determining
whether a text is positive, negative or neutral, using
various classification techniques. This analysis can be
aggregated over large sets of data and the resulting
information can be helpful in different contexts [3]. E.g.:
positive – The food is very tasty; negative – The service is
not good; neutral – The restaurant is in India. Here, it can
be seen that based on the words that the sentences contain
they are appropriately classified. In order to perform
sentimental analysis, it is necessary to train a classifier so
to classify the unknown samples accurately. Certain steps
are involved in order to perform the sentimental analysis.
The various steps are illustrated using the flowchart
shown in Fig. 1.
The feedbacks are first extracted from social media using
various available APIs (Tweepy), these feedbacks are
nothing but sentences that are posted by users that give an
insight into the restaurant‟s different aspects. E.g. “The
restaurant has an awesome ambience.”. Firstly, clean the
extracted data by removing slangs and emoticons, using
string operations and stop words using nltk English
stopwords dictionary. E.g. words like an, the, has are
stopwords and are thus removed. In this example, after
cleaning the feedback, the result is “restaurant awesome
ambience.”. The next step is to convert the sentence into a
list of words and perform POS (Parts of Speech) tagging,
this can be done by simply using the split() method which
returns an array of terms in the sentences. E.g.:
[„restaurant’, „awesome’, „ambience’].
The Topia package or nltk.pos_tag() method in Python
can be used to tag each term in the above array with a
POS - Nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs. From this,
the adjectives and adverbs are enough to find the
sentiment of the feedback. The array now contains
[„restaurant - noun‟, „awesome - adjective‟, „ambience -
noun‟]. The words in the sentences need to be brought
down to their original form. E.g.: flies, flying is converted
to fly which is the original word, the lemmatizer in nltk
can be used to find the base words. The set of phrases
obtained from this step at the moment are processed to
assign a polarity whether it is positive or negative [2].
And are further processed to discover how positive or
negative it is. positive. Hence, the positive and negative
feedbacks that are identified are used to train the classifier
that will improve the accuracy of the classifier. We use
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the Naive Bayes classifier in our approach. The end result
of this step is a set of positive, negative and neutral
sentences, out of which only the set of positive and
negative sentences are the useful feedback.
Clustering within positive and negative feedbacks
Next step is to perform clustering operation on the
positive and the negative set of feedbacks. This is useful
for determining the broad topics on which the feedbacks
have been obtained. And hence one knows why the
feedbacks are positive or why are they negative.
For e.g., consider five positive/negative feedbacks, out of
which, two of them talk about the ambience and three of
them talk about the quality of food. So here clustering
helps us to determine the broad topics - ambience and
quality of food, on which the feedback has been obtained.
As we know the traditional K-Means Algorithm has
certain drawbacks; it requires the number of clusters to be
specified initially, and it has a great dependency on initial
cluster center which when selected improperly leads to
unstable and inaccurate results, and it is also sensitive to
noisy data [4].
In order to overcome these limitations, we use modified
K-Means clustering with dynamic thresholding. Dynamic
thresholding helps in creating clusters dynamically
depending on the dataset. Dynamic Thresholding is
expressed by [5],
(1)
For two clusters A and B the variables are specified as
follows:
 represents the total number of contexts the
clusters A and B have in common.
 represents the total number of contexts present in
cluster B, but not in cluster A.
 represents the total number of contexts present in
cluster A, but not in cluster B.
In conventional k-means method, Euclidean distance is
used as a measure of similarity while in the modified k-
means approach, out of the numerous similarity measures
which might be a gift, we use Jaccard Index. The Jaccard
similarity index (sometimes called the Jaccard
similarity coefficient) is a measure of similarity between
two sets of data, the range of which lies between 0% to
100%. The higher the percentage, the more similar the
two populations. Jaccard Index between two sets can be
 Proceeding of 2018 IEEE International Conference on Current Trends toward Converging Technologies, Coimbatore, India

given as
Consider the following feedbacks collected from Zomato
(2) and Twitter as shown in Table 1:

Table 1: Collected Feedbacks

where ∩ denotes intersection and ∪ denotes union ID Feedbacks
between the two sets [6].
1 Always great service and clean rooms.
Modified K-means clustering with dynamic thresholding 2 Poor quality of food.
algorithm: 3 The room was clean, well lit, and comfortable
Input: D - a data set containing N positive/negative
4 Nice hotel. The breakfast was very good.
feedbacks.
Output: A set of k-clusters 5 The food was quiet expensive and not worth it.
Each pre-processed feedback is represented as a set of
words containing nouns using POS tags. And each cluster 6 The staff was nice and the breakfast was great.
represents a set of nouns present in all the feedbacks of
7 Great continental breakfast area.
that cluster.
8 The room was very comfortable.
Step 1: The first cluster is created using the first feedback.
Step 2: For each existing cluster, the new feedback is
compared with the cluster using Jaccard Index. Also
compute the Dynamic Threshold between the cluster and
the feedback.
Step 3: If Jaccard Index is greater than or equal to the
Dynamic Threshold, add the feedback to the existing
cluster and go to step 5.
Step 4: If the above condition fails, create a new cluster
for the feedback.
Step 5: Repeat step 2 to step 4 for all the N-1 feedbacks in Fig. 3: Positive and Negative feedbacks
D.
Fig. 3 shows the feedbacks after finding their polarities –
Identifying cluster labels
negative and positive.
Now, the next task is to identify the labels for the clusters
generated in the previous step. Each cluster is a set of
nouns that fulfilled the similarity criteria for clustering.
The labelling is performed on basis of the most frequently
occurring noun in the feedbacks present in that cluster.
The proposed system flow is described by Fig. 2.

Fig. 4: Positive Clusters and Cluster Labels

Fig. 5: Negative Clusters and Cluster Labels

Figs. 4 and 5 shows the list of nouns present in each

positive and negative feedbacks respectively, along with
Fig. 2: Proposed System Flow the clusters formed and with a suitable cluster label for
III.RESULT them.

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 Proceeding of 2018 IEEE International Conference on Current Trends toward Converging Technologies, Coimbatore, India
From the above result, we observe that, modified k-means
with dynamic thresholding produces accurate results as
compared to the dynamic k-means algorithm, without
dynamic clustering, where a threshold was defined before
clustering. This defined threshold is not universal for all
restaurant feedbacks and hence produces inaccurate
results.
IV.CONCLUSION
Our proposed methodology suggests a way to analyse the
feedbacks that are posted on various social media
platforms and apply the knowledge of Data mining
combined with Sentimental Analysis with the help of a
modified K-means algorithm with dynamic thresholding.
The scope of this system can be extended to multinational
companies, organisations and startups to boon their
development.
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[1]. Xing Fang, Justin Zhan, “Sentiment Analysis using
product review data,” Fang and Zhan Journal of Big
Data, 2015.
[2]. Soufiene Jaffali, Salma Jamoussi, Abdelmajid Ben
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Hamadou, Kamel Smaili, “Clustering and Classification
of Like-Minded People from Their Tweets,” 2014 IEEE
International Conference on Data Mining Workshop,
Dec. 2014, pp. 921-927.
[3]. Reshma Bhonde, Binita Bhagwat, Sayali Ingulkar,
Apeksha Pande, “Sentiment Analysis Based on
Dictionary Approach,” International Journal of
Emerging Engineering Research and Technology, Jan.
2015, vol. 3, pp. 51-55.
[4]. Caiquan Xiong, Zhen Hua, Ke Lv, Xuan Li, “An
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[5]. Pieter van de Spek, Steven Klusener, “Applying a
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[6]. Stephanie, “Jaccard Index/ Similarity Coefficient”, Dec.
2016. [Online]. Available:
http://www.statisticshowto.com/jaccard-index
[7]. Techopedia, “Data Mining”, 2015. [Online]. Available:
https://www.techopedia.com/definition/1181/data-
mining