Recognizing emotions in restaurant online reviews: a hybrid model integrating deep learning and a sentiment lexicon

Purpose This study aims to establish a model for rapid and accurate emotion recognition in restaurant online reviews, thus advancing the literature and providing practical insights into electronic word-of-mouth management for the industry. Design/methodology/approach This study elaborates a hybrid model that integrates deep learning (DL) and a sentiment lexicon (SL) and compares it to five other models, including SL, random forest (RF), naïve Bayes, support vector machine (SVM) and a DL model, for the task of emotion recognition in restaurant online reviews. These models are trained and tested using 652,348 online reviews from 548 restaurants. Findings The hybrid approach performs well for valence-based emotion and discrete emotion recognition and is highly applicable for mining online reviews in a restaurant setting. The performances of SL and RF are inferior when it comes to recognizing discrete emotions. The DL method and SVM can perform satisfactorily in the valence-based emotion recognition. Research limitations/implications These findings provide methodological and theoretical implications; thus, they advance the current state of knowledge on emotion recognition in restaurant online reviews. The results also provide practical insights into intelligent service quality monitoring and electronic word-of-mouth management for the industry. Originality/value This study proposes a superior model for emotion recognition in restaurant online reviews. The methodological framework and steps are elucidated in detail for future research and practical application. This study also details the performances of other commonly used models to support the selection of methods in research and practical applications.