This article proposes a method for Pareto charting that is based on unsupervised, freestyle text such as customer complaint, rework, scrap, or maintenance event descriptions. The proposed procedure is based on a slight extension of the latent Dirichlet allocation method to form multifield latent Dirichlet allocation. The extension is the usage of field‐specific dictionaries for multifield databases and changes to recommended default prior settings. We use a numerical study to motivate the prior setting selection. A real‐world case study associated with user reviews of Toyota Camry vehicles is used to illustrate the practical value of the proposed methods. The results indicate that only 4% of the words written by Consumer Reports reviewers from the last 10 years relate to the widely publicized unintended acceleration issue. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.