1 Overview
Working with my advisor Haoqi, I led the development of a project that treats location-based recommendation as a question of how place imprints experience, not just where venues are located. Drawing on travel guidebooks and HCI theories of "space versus place," I operationalized narrative claims—such as King Cake being routine in Louisiana but "imported" in Pennsylvania—into a concrete hypothesis set. We compared how often and how concretely specific experience phrases appear in reviews for the same Yelp category across different states. This framing allowed us to hold categories constant to reveal geographic meaning shifts, using a framework of environmental, cultural, social, and institutional drivers to interpret the results.
To test this, I engineered an end-to-end text pipeline using the Yelp Open Dataset across thirteen U.S. states. I cleaned millions of reviews, extracted n-gram activity phrases, and computed TF–IDF salience before applying a stabilized log-ratio to quantify regional distinctiveness. To ensure data quality, I iteratively refined thresholds and blacklist rules to filter out brand chatter and implausible phrases. The system pairs every numerical contrast with ranked review snippets, allowing us to audit whether terms like "no sales tax" truly reflected local behavior.
The resulting case portfolio demonstrates that review language reliably encodes regional experiential signatures. However, it also highlighted limitations where purely affective claims (e.g., a beach feeling "personal") were difficult to capture. These findings informed our design implications for future systems: interfaces that expose experiential facets alongside ratings, context-aware defaults, and transparent textual evidence.
2 Selected visuals
| Category | Region | Surfaced phrase (experience) | Dominant driver |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bakeries | Louisiana | king cake around Mardi Gras season | Cultural |
| Outlet malls | Delaware | no sales tax / cross-border shopping | Institutional |
| Basque restaurants | Nevada | picon punch as a pre-dinner ritual | Social |
Each row shows how, by holding the Yelp category fixed and contrasting review phrases across states, we recover distinct regional experiential signatures interpreted through our four-driver vocabulary.