Automatically extracting tourism-related opinion from Chinese social media

Abstract

Existing tourism-destination investigations of Chinese texts remain weak, and no approach is available to realize Chinese context semantically and automatically. To resolve this, we provide a novel method based on qualitative analysis for studying the online opinions of Chinese tourists regarding the destinations to which they travel. Both traditional and simplified Chinese forums were chosen as the object of study. Spain was selected as a travel destination to evaluate the proposed method. After processing the natural language, unstructured Chinese content is analysed to derive the general sentiment and relevant topics regarding the destination through user comments on social media. The proposed method allows us to understand what tourists are interested in and how they form opinions about tourist destinations.

Keywords:

• tourism destination
• Chinese tourists
• social networks
• content analysis
• natural-language processing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Fang-Wei Chen http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0538-2194