Analyzing fuzzy semantics of reviews for multi-criteria recommendations

Hotel reviews play a vital role in tourism recommender system. They should be analyzed effectively to enhance the accuracy of recommendations which can be generated either from crisp ratings on a fixed scale or real sentiments of reviews. But crisp ratings cannot represent the actual feelings of reviewers. Existing tourism recommender systems mostly recommend hotels on the basis of vague and sparse ratings resulting in inaccurate recommendations or preferences for online users. This paper presents a semantic approach to analyze the online reviews being crawled from tripadvisor.in. It discovers the underlying fuzzy semantics of reviews with respect to the multiple criteria of hotels rather than using the crisp ratings. The crawled reviews are preprocessed via data cleaning such as stopword and punctuation removal, tokenization, lemmatization, pos tagging to understand the semantics efficiently. Nouns representing frequent features of hotels are extracted from pre-processed reviews which are further used to identify opinion phrases. Fuzzy weights are derived from normalized frequency of frequent nouns and combined with sentiment score of all the synonyms of adjectives in the identified opinion phrases. This results in fuzzy semantics which form an ideal representation of reviews for a multi-criteria tourism recommender system. The proposed work is implemented in python by crawling the recent reviews of Jaipur hotels from TripAdvisor and analyzing their semantics. The resultant fuzzy semantics form a manually tagged dataset of reviews tagged with sentiments of identified aspects, respectively. Experimental results show improved sentiment score while considering all the synonyms of adjectives. The results are further used to fine-tune BERT models to form encodings for a query-based recommender system. The proposed approach can help tourism and hospitality service providers to take advantage of such sentiment analysis to examine the negative comments or unpleasant experiences of tourists and making appropriate improvements. Moreover, it will help online users to get better recommendations while planning their trips.