Chemosensory vocabulary in wine, perfume and food product reviews: Insights from language modeling.

• We compare and map the semantic spaces of sensory vocabularies of wine, perfume, and food reviews. • Vocabularies differ with respect to domain specificity, concreteness, descriptor type preference and degree of gustatory vs. olfactory association. • Wine vocabulary distinguishes between white and red wine qualities. Food vocabulary drinkables and edibles, as well as savory and non-savory products. • All vocabularies distinguish descriptors in terms of concreteness and valence, but valence is less prominent than in general olfactory vocabulary. • Our novel method allows a systematic comparison of sensory domains and provides a data-driven approach to derive domain-specific sensory lexicons. Chemosensory sensations are often hard to describe and quantify. Language models may facilitate a systematic understanding of sensory descriptions. We accessed consumer and expert reviews of wine, perfume, and food products (English language; about 68 million words in total) and analyzed their sensory descriptions. Using a novel data-driven method based on natural language data, we compared the three chemosensory vocabularies (wine, perfume, food) with respect to their vocabulary overlap and semantic properties, and explored their semantic spaces. The three vocabularies primarily differ with respect to domain specificity, concreteness, descriptor type preference and degree of gustatory vs. olfactory association. Wine vocabulary primarily distinguishes between white wine and red wine flavors and qualities. Food vocabulary separates drinkable and edible food products and ingredients, on the one hand, and savory and non-savory products, on the other. A salient distinction in all three vocabularies is between concrete and abstract/evaluative terms. Valence also plays a role in the semantic spaces of all three vocabularies, but valence is less prominent here than in general olfactory vocabulary. Our method allows a systematic comparison of sensory descriptors in the three product domains and provides a data-driven approach to derive sensory lexicons that can be applied by sensory scientists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]