Papers for
travel platform developers
Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.
Llm adapts to sacred heritage for temple review analysis
Adapting LLM-SC to Living Sacred Heritage: Domain-Specific Extraction, Semantic Networks and Human Evaluation on Pashupatinath Temple Reviews
Abstract: Large language model (LLM) pipelines can turn visitor reviews into structured data, but generic schemes may miss rituals, sacred spaces, cultural restrictions and emotionally mixed experiences at living sacred heritage sites. We adapted the LLM-Social Computing (LLM-SC) framework to Pashupatinath Temple, Nepal, by specifying a 12-type entity taxonomy (four original LLM-SC types plus eight sacred-heritage types), four relation types and nine aspect-sentiment dimensions in a GPT-4o extraction prompt, which was applied to a fixed random sample of 2,500 English-language Tripadvisor reviews from a processed corpus of 3,939. The exports contain 11,286 entity, 6,232 aspect-sentiment and 5,590 relation records, covering 2,485, 2,487 and 2,433 reviews, respectively; the eight added sacred-heritage types account for 64.8% of entity records. Against an adjudicated two-annotator reference for 200 reviews, exact normalized surface-and-type matching gave provisional entity scores of 41.0% precision, 21.8% recall and 28.4% micro-F1. Aspect-presence F1 was 53.6% and end-to-end aspect-plus-polarity F1 was 42.6%. Human adjudication supported 153 of 194 first-listed relation candidates (one per review; 78.9%), a candidate-level rate that does not estimate relation recall or whole-graph precision. The contribution is a culturally grounded, domain-specific adaptation with component-wise human evaluation and explicit reproducibility and generalization limitations.
Travel recommender systems should become flexible advisors with generative ai
Behavior-Mining, Generative Conversations, and Collaborative Advisory: the Future of Travel and Tourism Recommender Systems
Abstract: Since the early adoption of e-commerce, travel and tourism has been a lab for the design of recommender systems: tools that help travelers choose destinations, flights, accommodations, and combine them into itineraries. Data-driven recommendation techniques, ranging from case-based reasoning to reinforcement learning, have been adapted to travelers' needs. The research community has produced multifaceted prototypes of travel and tourism recommender systems (TTRSs), which are context-dependent, multistakeholder-oriented, and more recently, addressing sustainability issues, such as overtourism. Despite this enduring work, TTRSs are not widespread yet. We argue that three limitations can explain this: outdated and sparse data sets used to train and validate TTRSs, algorithms that prioritize prediction accuracy over domain-specific dimensions such as novelty and contextual relevance, and a failure to address the specific needs of travelers. Targeted incremental research could address these limitations, but a disruptive factor has meanwhile entered the ecosystem of tourism information and commercialization platforms: generative artificial intelligence. According to market research, GenAI applications are becoming the primary entry point for travelers planning their trips. This forces research to rethink how TTRSs should be designed and which core techniques should be integrated. We claim that future TTRSs, in addition to offering personalized information filtering, should become more flexible advisors that support decision making, integrating multiple data types and AI techniques, from data mining to natural language processing. Moreover, they must transparently balance the conflicting goals of travelers, service suppliers, platform owners, and local communities. We then outline research targets for building more effective TTRSs, fruitfully combining old and new recommendation techniques.