"More Than Just Words: Latent Semantic Analysis, Online Reviews and Restaurant Closure"

Online reviews and their effect on business outcomes have long been of interest to information systems scholars. In this study, we complement the existing research on online reviews by proposing a novel use of modern text analysis methods to uncover the semantic structure of online reviews and assess their impact on the survival of merchants in the marketplace. We analyze online reviews from 2005 to 2014 for restaurants in a major metropolitan area in the United States and find that variables capturing semantic structure within review text are important predictors of the survival of restaurants, a relationship that has not been explored in the extant literature. Our results suggest that our text mining methodology augment traditional models that use only numerical data from online reviews generated by customers.