Downloading Yelp Reviews

[ldenney]

I am a fairly new SAS VA 7.3 user and also new to analyzing social media. I am working with a large client with many individual locations and wanted to find a way to download Yelp reviews and load them into SAS VA. SAS VA allows for an automated download from FaceBook and Twitter but I don't see an options for Yelp. I created some reviews to load into SAS VA to display in a text Word Cloud with the sentiment option. I didn't really get the result I was hoping for, any other suggestions on how best to display this data would be much appreciated.

[I_Kong_SAS]

Hi Idenney, can you tell us a little more about your data and what you want to do? Unfortunately Yelp doesn't make full text of reviews available for this kind of text analysis. There is an academic challenge (non-commercial use) with some data and sample questions for researchers: https://www.yelp.com/dataset_challenge

[ldenney]

Hi - pretty much as I describe in the problem...I have a client with a lot of locations and I am trying to get reviews from all of their locations and provide dashboarding capabilities for executives to track sentiment for each of their business units. I don't know if there are 3rd party products to strip out the Yelp reviews or another method through SAS. Ultimately, I would like to create some dashboards using SAS VA analyzing sentiment of the Yelp reviews.


For my test case, I clipped and pasted the reviews into a simple Excel spreadsheet, but if I have several hundred locations, this would not be an efficient way to do this.


I checked out your link and I'm not finding the connection to what I'm trying to achieve. Any help or thoughts are much appreciated!

[I_Kong_SAS]

Hi Idenney, that sounds very interesting. I don't know if your client has a way to access the reviews on their own businesses. I would hope so. I'm not too familiar with the Yelp API, but it appears from the FAQ: https://www.yelp.com/developers/faq and ToS that they do not allow full review text access by third parties via API or "scraping" (a SAS or other program to efficiently retrieve this text via API or spiders/robots). Assuming you can legally and technically retrieve this text you'll need a unique document ID for the variable you want to make a document collection. For example, if you have a Review variable and a ReviewID variable, right click on Review and make it a Document Collection, then select ReviewID as the Document ID.

[ldenney]

Thanks! I'm checking with my client to see if they have a business account set up for each of their business units. The weblink you provided will be helpful. Is your description of the document collection referring to SAS VA word cloud? I'm not sure I'm following you.

Thanks again!

[I_Kong_SAS]

Hi Idenney. Yes. You can make the text variable a document collection in the left panel - right before making the word cloud.