Professors Matt Baker and Brett Hashimoto’s award-winning research dissects the language of online reviews.
For Matt Baker (Editing, Business Communication), his research on the semantics of customer reviews started with a home-improvement project during the COVID-19 pandemic. When the bathroom vanity he ordered for his basement arrived, he noticed a chipped edge on the marble countertop. What he thought would be a quick exchange turned into two additional shipments and several interactions with Marissa from customer services before he had an unblemished product.
A few days later, to his surprise, he received an invitation to leave a Google review, and, despite his less-than-smooth experience, found himself giving five stars, . Why? “Marissa was amazing. I knew we were going to be taken care of,” says Baker. That review, and his overall experience, inspired a research paper that would soon become the Association for Business Communication (ABC)’s 2025 Outstanding Article in the International Journal of Business Communication.
The Inquiry
Baker’s encounter with customer service was still fresh on his mind when Brett Hashimoto (Corpus Linguistics) came to Baker looking to collaborate on a research project. Inspired by his experience, Baker did a quick preliminary look at online restaurant reviews, especially those that contained the word but. Even in this initial, surface-level search, he found a pattern between the use of contrastive terms, the overall tone of the review, and, even more directly, the star rating.
Baker and Hashimoto looked at the use of adversative connectives (ACs), a category of words like but, however, nevertheless, and on the other hand that indicate contrast between two sentence parts. The two sentence parts can be shifted around, but doing so also changes the meaning.
For example, if a review read, “The food was delicious, but the service left much to be desired,” the negative idea expressed after but indicates that the customer was dissatisfied and probably won’t return to the restaurant. On the other hand, if a review read, “The service left much to be desired, but the food was delicious,” the positive idea shared after but would indicate a customer’s satisfaction and willingness to visit the restaurant again.
Baker and Hashimoto’s hypothesis seemed to be forming itself, and they ran with it: the tone of the part following the AC seemed to be the most significant factor in predicting the customer’s satisfaction. Soon after starting their research, they had numbers to back their theory.
The Numbers
After sampling 1,000 reviews from a corpus of nearly 35,000 online reviews for restaurants in the United States, Baker and Hashimoto found that the use of ACs is important for how customers communicate their satisfaction, or lack thereof, via online platforms. Their research suggested that what follows an AC is significant because it expresses how a customer’s expectations were or were not met.
They found that every time a reviewer used an AC followed by a negative statement, it became more likely that the star rating decreased. Every time a reviewer used an AC followed by a positive statement, the star rating was more likely to increase.
However, the numbers indicated that it’s easier to raise a star rating than to reduce it. “In other words,” Baker explains, “a decrease in star rating likely comes after a restaurant fails to meet a customer’s expectations over and over, but an increase can come after just a few times of exceeding the customer’s expectations.”
The Implication
While Baker and Hashimoto’s research focused specifically on restaurant reviews, they anticipate this theory will apply to other forms of online reviews as well, helping all kinds of business owners understand and better meet customer expectations. Owners can easily pick out the most important parts of a review by looking at what follows the AC, which Baker and Hashimoto believe is the driving factor behind the rating.
With a better understanding of how to dissect online reviews, owners can work to not only decrease the number of negative comments but increase the number of positive ones. Baker believes this theory reveals that the ideal strategy for businesses is “be excellent, and then just be a little more excellent.” His research suggests that the best way to ensure positive reviews is to manage customer expectations by finding that “sweet spot” where a customer’s experience is just slightly above their expectations.
The Award
When Baker and Hashimoto completed their research, their article was published in the International Journal of Business Communication and later received the ABC 2025 Outstanding Article award.
For Baker, the award symbolizes the synergy of colleagues collaborating and the significance of involving undergraduate students in research. He adds that the two undergraduate students involved in the project, Kate Thompson (Editing and Publishing ’24) and Emma Hebertson (Linguistics, Editing and Publishing, Spanish ’23), were integral in the data analysis process.
Baker notes that his research was a merge of both his personal and professional life, which is illustrated in the project’s unique inspiration. “I love this project for many reasons,” Baker says with a laugh, “but the inspiration for the paper came, in part, because of finishing a basement during COVID-19.”
Baker and Hashimoto’s full article can be found here.