Automated Sentiment Analysis in Tourism: Comparison of Approaches

Interest in applying Big Data to tourism is increasing, and automated sentiment analysis has been used to extract public opinion from various sources. This article evaluates the suitability of different types of automated classifiers for applications typical in tourism, hospitality, and marketing studies by comparing their performance to that of human raters. While the commonly used performance indices suggest that on easier-to-classify data sets machine learning methods demonstrate performance comparable to that by human raters, other performance measures such as Cohen's kappa show that the results of machine learning are still inferior to manual processing. On more difficult and noisy data sets, automated analysis has poorer performance than human raters. The article discusses issues pertinent to selection of appropriate sentiment analysis software and offers a word of caution against using automated classifiers uncritically.