Maria Teresa Linaza’s research while affiliated with Vicomtech and other places

Social Media and consumer-generated content continue to grow and impact the hospitality domain. Consumers write online reviews to indicate their level of satisfaction with a hotel and inform other consumers on the Internet of their hotel stay experience. A number of websites specialized in tourism and hospitality have flourished on the Web (e.g. Tripadvisor). The tremendous growth of these data-generating sources demands new tools to deal with them. To cope with big amounts of customer-generated reviews and comments, Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools have become necessary to automatically process and manage textual customer reviews (e.g. to perform Sentiment Analysis). This work describes OpeNER, a NLP platform applied to the hospitality domain to automatically process customer-generated textual content and obtain valuable information from it. The presented platform consists of a set of Open Source and free NLP tools to analyse text based on a modular architecture to ease its modification and extension. The training and evaluation has been performed using a set of manually annotated hotel reviews gathered from websites like Zoover and HolidayCheck.

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have changed the society, including the recreational experiences. ICTs have created new spaces for the recreational participation, which often only recreate the same experiences on virtual spaces. These technological advances are one of the main drivers of the cultural and creative production. As people use ICTs in different activities of their daily life, such as home entertainment, they demand a higher sophistication level in cultural heritage applications. This paper describes the implementation of a software framework to generate cultural experiences, aiming at their integration in current flows of creative processes; semantic standardized access to different distributed knowledge sources; flexible integration of services; and content oriented visualization. It is worth highlighting that this platform will allow users without a technology background (content producers, education departments of cultural institutions) to generate new experiences based on reusing existing multimedia contents and designing the stories they want to tell.