Predicting happiness: user interactions and sentiment analysis in an online travel forum

Abstract

Web sources of tourism services provide valuable resources of knowledge not only for the travellers but also for the companies. Tourism operators are increasingly aware that user related data should be regarded as an important asset. Furthermore, as data is permanently generated and always available, the landscape of empirical research is changing. In this paper, user activities and interactions in the tourism domain are analysed. In particular, the emotions of the users regarding their forthcoming trips are studied with the objective to characterize interdependencies between them. Social network analysis is applied to examine interactions between the users. To capture their emotions, text mining techniques and sentiment analysis are applied to construct a measure, which is based on free-text comments in a travel forum. The experimental outcome provides some evidence that the network has an effect on the sentiment of the users.