Personalized travel recommendation based on sentiment-aware multimodal topic model

Abstract

In this paper, we try to solve the personalized travel recommendation problem by exploiting the multi-modal data available from the real world social media, and a probabilistic graph model so called Sentiment-aware Multi-modal Topic Model (SMTM) is proposed to mine the latent semantics of the multimodal data on the online travel website. Distinguished from previous approaches, our proposed approach try to mine the topics from tourist and attraction domains separately for disclosing semantics for tourist topics and attraction themes. In addition, we analyze tourist's sentiments on attractions to further obtain the tourist's attitude over attractions and recommend the attraction with proper sentiment on the related attraction themes accordingly. Based on the proposed SMTM model, the documents in tourist domain and in attraction domain can be compared with each other after they were projected into the mutual topic space, and this latent space projection scheme can be further applied to two personalized traveling recommendations, that is, the single platform traveling recommendation and the inter-platform traveling recommendation. Evaluation results based on the real world online travel website have shown the improved performance of our method.