27 Jun Food & Wine: Food is too sweet, according to machine learning analysis of Amazon reviews
Posted at 18:11h
in Media Mentions
Reading Amazon reviews can be an annoying and tedious process. Why are you reviewing the product if you haven’t used it yet? Why are you complaining about the size of the box it came in? Are you even a real person?! But speaking of not-real-people, a team of taste and smell researchers at the Monell Center in Philadelphia came up with an idea: What if we used a machine learning algorithm to read, like, all of the Amazon reviews… or at least about 400,000 of them? Using this text-mining technique, they dug through the reviews of 67,553 food products on Amazon with a single hope: “to gain real-world insight into the food choices that people make.” Their findings: Our food is too damn sweet.