When BERT Started Traveling: TourBERT—A Natural Language Processing Model for the Travel Industry

Abstract

In recent years, Natural Language Processing (NLP) has become increasingly important for extracting new insights from unstructured text data, and pre-trained language models now have the ability to perform state-of-the-art tasks like topic modeling, text classification, or sentiment analysis. Currently, BERT is the most widespread and widely used model, but it has been shown that a potential to optimize BERT can be applied to domain-specific contexts. While a number of BERT models that improve downstream tasks’ performance for other domains already exist, an optimized BERT model for tourism has yet to be revealed. This study thus aimed to develop and evaluate TourBERT, a pre-trained BERT model for the tourism industry. It was trained from scratch and outperforms BERT-Base in all tourism-specific evaluations. Therefore, this study makes an essential contribution to the growing importance of NLP in tourism by providing an open-source BERT model adapted to tourism requirements and particularities.