BERT-based tourism named entity recognition: making use of social media for travel recommendations

Abstract

Background Social media has become a massive encyclopedia of almost anything due to its content richness. People tell stories, write comments and feedback, and share knowledge through social media. The information available on social media enables ‘clueless’ travelers to get quick travel recommendations in the tourism sector. Through a simple query, such as typing ‘places to visit in Bali’, travelers can get many blog articles to help them decide which places of interest to visit. However, doing this reading task without a helper can be overwhelming. Methods To overcome this problem, we developed Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT)-based tourism named entity recognition system, which is used to highlight tourist destination places in the query result. BERT is a state-of-the-art machine learning framework for natural language processing that can give a decent performance in various settings and cases. Our developed tourism named entity recognition (NER) model specifies three different tourist destinations: heritage, natural, and purposefully built (man-made or artificial). The dataset is taken from various tourism-related community articles and posts. Results The model achieved an average F1-score of 0.80 and has been implemented into a traveling destination recommendation system. By using this system, travelers can get quick recommendations based on the popularity of places visited in the query frame. Discussion Based on the survey that we conducted to target respondents who have never visited and have no or limited knowledge about tourist attractions in some example cities, their average interest level from the recommendation results is higher than four on a scale of 1 to 5. Thus, it can be considered a good recommendation. Furthermore, the NER model performance is comparable to another related research.