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Neutral or Negative?: Sentiment Evaluation in Reviews of Hosting Services

Published: 16 October 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Sharing economy represents activities between people to obtain, provide, or share access to goods and services, coordinated by online services. Airbnb and Couchsurfing are examples of sharing economy, where users offer hosting service in their own houses to the public. In both services, guests can review accommodations. In hosting services of the sharing economy, there is personal contact between those who offer and contract the accommodation, which can affect users' decision to make negative reviews. This is because negative reviews can damage the offered services. To evaluate this issue, we collected reviews from two sharing economy platforms, Airbnb and Couchsurfing, and from one platform of the formal economy that works mostly with hotels, Booking.com, for some cities in the United States and Brazil. We performed a sentiment analysis in the shared texts and found that reviews in the sharing economy tend to be more favorable than those in the formal economy. This can represent a problem in those systems, as an experiment with volunteers performed in this study suggests. In addition, we present some of the main features of these comments, as well as a proposal on how to exploit the results obtained.

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Cited By

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  • (2022)Expressing the Experience: An Analysis of Airbnb Customer SentimentsTourism and Hospitality10.3390/tourhosp30300423:3(685-705)Online publication date: 3-Aug-2022
  • (2022)A Low-Cost High-Performance Semantic and Physical Distance Calculation Method Based on ZIP CodeIEICE Transactions on Information and Systems10.1587/transinf.2021DAP0005E105.D:5(920-927)Online publication date: 1-May-2022

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cover image ACM Other conferences
WebMedia '18: Proceedings of the 24th Brazilian Symposium on Multimedia and the Web
October 2018
437 pages
ISBN:9781450358675
DOI:10.1145/3243082
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 16 October 2018

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Author Tags

  1. Airbnb
  2. Booking
  3. Couchsurfing
  4. Reviews
  5. Sentiment Analysis
  6. Sharing Economy
  7. Web Mining

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  • Research
  • Refereed limited

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WebMedia '18
WebMedia '18: Brazilian Symposium on Multimedia and the Web
October 16 - 19, 2018
BA, Salvador, Brazil

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WebMedia '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 37 of 111 submissions, 33%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 270 of 873 submissions, 31%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2022)Expressing the Experience: An Analysis of Airbnb Customer SentimentsTourism and Hospitality10.3390/tourhosp30300423:3(685-705)Online publication date: 3-Aug-2022
  • (2022)A Low-Cost High-Performance Semantic and Physical Distance Calculation Method Based on ZIP CodeIEICE Transactions on Information and Systems10.1587/transinf.2021DAP0005E105.D:5(920-927)Online publication date: 1-May-2022

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