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Automatic analysis of textual hotel reviews

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Abstract

Social Media and consumer-generated content continue to grow and impact the hospitality domain. Consumers write online reviews to indicate their level of satisfaction with a hotel and inform other consumers on the Internet of their hotel stay experience. A number of websites specialized in tourism and hospitality have flourished on the Web (e.g. Tripadvisor). The tremendous growth of these data-generating sources demands new tools to deal with them. To cope with big amounts of customer-generated reviews and comments, Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools have become necessary to automatically process and manage textual customer reviews (e.g. to perform Sentiment Analysis). This work describes OpeNER, a NLP platform applied to the hospitality domain to automatically process customer-generated textual content and obtain valuable information from it. The presented platform consists of a set of Open Source and free NLP tools to analyse text based on a modular architecture to ease its modification and extension. The training and evaluation has been performed using a set of manually annotated hotel reviews gathered from websites like Zoover and HolidayCheck.

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Notes

  1. The complete information can be found at http://www.opener-project.eu.

  2. https://opennlp.apache.org/index.html.

  3. https://github.com/dbpedia-spotlight/dbpedia-spotlight/wiki.

  4. Formerly KAF acronym stood for Kyoto Annotation Format, due to the name of the project in which a first version of KAF was designed. Since then KAF has evolved and the K letter changed its meaning to “Knowledge”.

  5. https://github.com/shuyo/language-detection.

  6. https://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Fall_2003/ling001/penn_treebank_pos.html.

  7. https://code.google.com/p/semanticvectors/.

  8. http://www.zoover.com.

  9. http://www.holidaycheck.com/.

  10. http://tour-pedia.org/about/.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of eTourism and Cultural Heritage, Vicomtech-IK4, San Sebastián, Spain

    Aitor García-Pablos & Maria Teresa Linaza

  2. Department of Human Speech and Language Technologies, Vicomtech-IK4, San Sebastián, Spain

    Montse Cuadros

Authors
  1. Aitor García-Pablos
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  2. Montse Cuadros
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  3. Maria Teresa Linaza
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Correspondence to Aitor García-Pablos.

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García-Pablos, A., Cuadros, M. & Linaza, M.T. Automatic analysis of textual hotel reviews. Inf Technol Tourism 16, 45–69 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40558-015-0047-7

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