Sensory Descriptor Analysis of Whisky Lexicons through the Use of Deep Learning (original) (raw)

This paper is concerned with extracting relevant terms from a text corpus on whisk(e)y. “Relevant” terms are usually contextually defined in their domain of use. Arguably, every domain has a specialized vocabulary used for describing things. For example, the field of Sensory Science, a sub-field of Food Science, investigates human responses to food products and differentiates “descriptive” terms for flavors from “ordinary”, non-descriptive language. Within the field, descriptors are generated through Descriptive Analysis, a method wherein a human panel of experts tastes multiple food products and defines descriptors. This process is both time-consuming and expensive. However, one could leverage existing data to identify and build a flavor language automatically. For example, there are thousands of professional and semi-professional reviews of whisk(e)y published on the internet, providing abundant descriptors interspersed with non-descriptive language. The aim, then, is to be able t...