Hotel recommendation system by bipartite networks and link prediction

Abstract

With the rapid growth of the Internet in recent years, online social media has become very important for people. People often use social media tools to communicate and share their ideas or experiences regardless of time and place. One of the areas where the use of these tools is widespread is tourism. It is one of the hardest tasks to find a suitable hotel for travellers. There are many websites where accommodation services of the tourism enterprises are evaluated. People share their experiences about the hotels they stayed through these websites. Positive or negative comments are an effective factor in hotel selection. The purpose of this study is to construct a hotel recommendation system based on user’s location using online hotel reviews. The reviews crawled from TripAdvisor.com were filtered according to their total scores, and a dataset was obtained consisting of users and reviews of their liked hotels. For the recommendation task, first, three different bipartite networks consisting of users and hotels were modelled, which were global, country and city based. Then, in these networks, it was recommended hotels to users for their next choice with link prediction methods, using the common hotels where the users prefer to stay in the past. The most successful results were obtained in the city-based network. With this study, it was tried to reduce the time spent reading the online reviews and finding the suitable hotel. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study on recommending a hotel using online reviews by bipartite networks.