Towards a non-oriented approach for the evaluation of Odor quality

Abstract

When evaluating an odor, non-specialists generally provide descriptions as bags of terms. Nevertheless, these evaluations cannot be processed by classical odor analysis methods that have been designed for trained evaluators having an excellent mastery of professional controlled vocabulary. Indeed, currently, mainly oriented approaches based on learning vocabularies are used. These approaches too restrictively limit the possible descriptors available for an uninitiated public and therefore require a costly learning phase of the vocabulary. The objective of this work is to merge the information expressed by these free descriptions (terms) into a set of non-ambiguous descriptors best characterizing the odor; this will make it possible to evaluate the odors based on non-specialist descriptions. This paper discusses a non-oriented approach based on Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Representation techniques-it does not require learning a lexical field and can therefore be used to evaluate odors with non-specialist evaluators.