Abigail Smith Undergraduate Dissertation 2016/17

The Language of Sheffield Menus

Supervised by A.Vlachos

Abstract

Menus have been dated back to the Song Dynasty in China, they are provided in the majority of restaurants and they are volumes of text which we read every time we dine out at one of these establishments. But what explains the difference in pricing found on menus between different restaurants? Arguably the location of the restaurant, the quality of ingredients used and the experience of the staff hired all tend to play a role in pricing, but there has been suggestion that maybe its the language of the menus that has an effect too. This project aims to investigate the effect that the language of menus has on pricing in order to determine whether by just making a dish sound more enticing, a restaurant can justify a price increase. Machine learning techniques will be implemented to investigate the effect of language in menus. Armed with the knowledge of what makes a description worth more, the system created will be able to predict the price of a dish given a description inputted by a user.