Assessing the placeness of locations through user-contributed content

Previous research has argued that urban places are becoming “place-less” and inauthentic. Many local policies have also proposed to encourage more independent stores in order to restore urban identity. Others argue, however, that chain stores provide affordable merchandise and different locations of the same chain may have different meanings to an individual. The research presented in this paper uses a Convolutional Neural Networks model to extract opinion aspects from more than 3 million user-contributed Yelp restaurant reviews. The results show high homogeneity among cities in terms of the average proportions of aspects in restaurant reviews. In addition, for fast food chains, “location” is the only aspect category reviewed proportionally higher than independent fast food restaurants. An analysis of the co-occurrences of “location” indicates that the identity of chain restaurants stems from the comparison between the same chain of different locations whereas the identity of the independent restaurants is more diverse, implying the intricacies of placeness of urban stores. This research demonstrates that fine-grained sentiment analysis (i.e., opinion aspect extraction and analysis) with geo-tagged text data is fruitful for studying nuanced place perceptions on a large scale.