In the Eye of the Beer-Holder. Lexical Descriptors of Aroma and Taste Sensations in Beer Reviews

摘要

Western languages do not dispose of a well elaborated vocabulary for describing smell and flavour sensations. We investigate whether beer experts share a common vocabulary to describe beer properties. We collected an English text corpus of beer reviews and analyzed the lexical descriptors used by beer-tasting experts to describe aromas and flavours. The informativeness of beer reviews was investigated by running a machine learning experiment for predicting the colour of a beer based on the review text. This preliminary experiment shows promising results, with average accuracy figures of about 60% for automatic beer colour prediction. Our experimental results show that beer experts share a common vocabulary to describe beer characteristics in a consistent way, allowing to automatically predict beer properties based on the review text.