Automating tourism online reviews: a neural network based aspect-oriented sentiment classification

Purpose This paper aims to classify the sentiment of online tourism-hospitality reviews at an aspect level. A new aspect-oriented sentiment classification method is proposed based on a neural network model. Design/methodology/approach This study constructs an aspect-oriented sentiment classification model using an integrated four-layer neural network: the bidirectional encoder representation from transformers (BERT) word vector model, long short-term memory, interactive attention-over-attention (IAOA) mechanism and a linear output layer. The model was trained, tested and validated on an open training data set and 92,905 reviews extrapolated from restaurants in Tokyo. Findings The model achieves significantly better performance compared with other neural networks. The findings provide empirical evidence to validate the suitability of this new approach in the tourism-hospitality domain. Research limitations/implications More sentiments should be identified to measure more fine-grained tourism-hospitality experience, and new aspects are recommended that can be automatically added into the aspect set to provide dynamic support for new dining experiences. Originality/value This study provides an update to the literature with respect to how a neural network could improve the performance of aspect-oriented sentiment classification for tourism-hospitality online reviews.