Using Neural Network Models for Wine Review Classification

Wines are usually evaluated by wine experts and enthusiasts who give numeric ratings as well as text reviews. While most wine classification studies have been based on conventional statistical models using numeric variables, there has been very limited work on implementing neural network models using wine reviews. In this paper, we apply neural network models (CNN, BiLSTM, and BERT) to extract useful information from wine reviews and classify wines according to different rating classes. Using a large collection of wine reviews from Wine Spectator, the study shows that BERT, a neural network framework recently developed by Google, has the best performance. In the two-class classification (90–100 and 80–89), BERT achieves an accuracy of 89.12%, followed by BiLSTM (88.69%) and CNN (88.02%). In the four-class classification (95–100, 90–94, 85–89, and 80–84), BERT yields an 81.57% accuracy, while the other two produce an 80% accuracy. The neural network models in the paper are independent of domain knowledge and thus can be easily extended to other kinds of text analysis. Expanding the limited work on wine text review classification studies, these models are up-to-date and provide valuable additions to wine data analysis. (JEL Classifications: C45, C88, D83)