The application and comparison of web services for sentiment analysis in tourism

The popularity of social computing and sentiment analysis has attracted an increasing attention of tourism industry and academia. The sentiment analysis of residents´ and tourists´ plays an important role to the development of tourism. It aims to identify and analyze opinions and emotions contained in reviews which are expressed by residents or tourists. Although it´s a challenging task, many companies and research institutes are developing web services to provide public-access and cost-effective solutions to the problem. However, to the best of our knowledge, there are very few studies to apply and compare these web services in tourism. Therefore, in this work we make an initial attempt to explore a set of three web services and compare their sentiment analysis capabilities using the well-known TripAdvisor data collection. Experiment results lead to some interesting conclusions.