Skip to main content

Age Prediction of Social Media Users: Case Study on Robots in Hospitality

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Robot Intelligence Technology and Applications 7 (RiTA 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems ((LNNS,volume 642))

Abstract

Social media has gained popularity and we witness a vast volume of publicly available social media posts where people are commenting on different topics. This discussion contains a lot of valuable information deeply hidden inside the data and its metadata, which can be valuable for different stockholders. To extract this information different methods have been proposed in the literature and methods relied on different aspects of data and were based on diverse techniques such as text mining, machine and deep learning, predictive analytics, and natural language processing. This work proposes a method that relies on transformer-based architectures and it is based on supervised machine learning that predicts the age indirectly hidden in the description users provided in their profiles. To test the accuracy of the proposed method the case study of robots acceptance in hospitality has been considered. Relevant posts from social media Twitter have been collected and the proposed model tested. Results from extensive experimental evaluation demonstrate the suitability of the proposed method achieving high accuracy of age prediction, to the extent of 82% on test data. To demonstrate the usability and value of predicting the age of social media users we calculate the emotions as well as sentiment in posts and investigate the acceptance of robots in hospitality for different age groups.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 189.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 249.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    https://pytorch.org/hub/huggingface_pytorch-transformers/.

  2. 2.

    https://pytorch.org/docs/stable/generated/torch.optim.AdamW.html.

References

  1. Ampountolas, A., Legg, M.P.: A segmented machine learning modeling approach of social media for predicting occupancy. Int. J. Contemp. Hosp. Manag. 33(6), 2001–2021 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCHM-06-2020-0611

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Antipov, G., Baccouche, M., Berrani, S.A., Dugelay, J.L.: Effective training of convolutional neural networks for face-based gender and age prediction. Pattern Recogn. 72, 15–26 (2017)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Baatarjav, E., Phithakkitnukoon, S., Dantu, R.: Group recommendation system for Facebook. In: OTM Confederated International Conferences On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems, pp. 211–219 (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Chen, J., Becken, S., Stantic, B.: Harnessing social media to understand tourist mobility: the role of information technology and big data. In: Tourism Review, Vol. 77, No. 4, pp. 1219–1233 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1108/TR-02-2021-0090

  5. Chen, J., Becken, S., Stantic, B.: Using weibo to track global mobility of Chinese visitors. Ann. Tour. Res. 89 (2021)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Chen, J., Becken, S., Stantic, B.: Assessing destination satisfaction by social media: an innovative approach using importance-performance analysis. Ann. Tour. Res. 93, 103371 (2022)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Devlin, J., Chang, M., Lee, K., Toutanova, K.: BERT: pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. CoRR abs/1810.04805v2 (2018). http://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805

  8. Huang, D., Coghlan, A., Jin, X.: Crossing the chasm: resistance to and adoption of airbnb by Chinese consumers. J. Travel Tour. Mark. 38(6), 597–621 (2021)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Hutto, C.J., Gilbert, E.: Vader: a parsimonious rule-based model for sentiment analysis of social media text. In: Proceedings of the 8th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, vol. 8, pp. 216–225 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Kim, S.S., Kim, J., Badu-Baiden, F., Giroux, M., Choi, Y.: Preference for robot service or human service in hotels? Impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Int. J. Hosp. Manag. 93, 102795 (2021)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Lan, Z., Chen, M., Goodman, S., Gimpel, K., Sharma, P., Soricut, R.: Albert: a lite bert for self supervised learning of language representations (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Mandal, R., Chen, J., Becken, S., Stantic, B.: Tweets topic classification and sentiment analysis based on transformer-based language models. Vietnam J. Comput. Sci. 340–350 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1142/S2196888822500269

  13. Mohammad, S., Turney, P.: Crowdsourcing a word: emotion association lexicon. Comput. Intell. 29, 436–465 (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Nguyen, D., Gravel, R., Trieschnigg, D., Meder, T.: How old do you think i am?" A study of language and age in twitter. In: Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, pp. 439–448 (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Nguyen, D., Smith, N.A., Rosé, C.P.: Author age prediction from text using linear regression. In: Proceedings of the 5th ACL-HLT Workshop on Language Technology for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, and Humanities, pp. 115–123 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Peersman, C., Daelemans, W., Van Vaerenbergh, L.: Predicting age and gender in online social networks. In: Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Search and Mining User-Generated Contents, pp. 37–44 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Prentice, C., Chen, J., Stantic, B.: Timed intervention in COVID-19 and panic buying. J. Retail. Consum. Serv. 57, 102203 (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Rosenthal, S., McKeown, K.: Age prediction in blogs: a study of style, content, and online behavior in pre-and post-social media generations. In: Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pp. 763–772 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Savchenko, A.V.: Efficient facial representations for age, gender and identity recognition in organizing photo albums using multi-output convnet. PeerJ Comput. Sci. 5, e197 (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Schwartz, H.A., et al.: Personality, gender, and age in the language of social media: the open-vocabulary approach. PLoS ONE 8(9), e73791 (2013)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Stantic, B., Pokornỳ, J.: Opportunities in big data management and processing. Databases Inf. Syst. 270, 15–26 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Vaswani, N., et al.: Attention is all you need (2017). https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

  23. Verma, C., Illés, Z., Stoffová, V.: Age group predictive models for the real time prediction of the university students using machine learning: preliminary results. In: 2019 IEEE International Conference on Electrical, Computer and Communication Technologies (ICECCT), pp. 1–7 (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Williams, A.M., Rodriguez, I., Makkonen, T.: Innovation and smart destinations: critical insights. Ann. Tour. Res. 83, 102930 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  25. Wu, B., Wang, L., Wang, S., Zeng, Y.R.: Forecasting the us oil markets based on social media information during the COVID-19 pandemic. Energy 226, 120403 (2021)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Wu, Y., et al.: Google’s neural machine translation system: Bridging the gap between human and machine translation. In: arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.08144 (2016)

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Bela Stantic .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Chen, J., Stantic, B., Chen, J. (2023). Age Prediction of Social Media Users: Case Study on Robots in Hospitality. In: Jo, J., et al. Robot Intelligence Technology and Applications 7. RiTA 2022. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 642. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26889-2_39

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics