Air travel is one of the most frequently used means of transportation in our every-day life. Thus, it is not surprising that an increasing number of travelers share their experiences with airlines and airports in form of online reviews on the Web. In this work, we thrive to explain and uncover the features of airline reviews that contribute most to traveler satisfaction. To that end, we examine reviews crawled from the Skytrax air travel review portal. Skytrax provides four review categories to review airports, lounges, airlines and seats. Each review category consists of several five-star ratings as well as free-text review content. In this paper, we conducted a comprehensive feature study and we find that not only five-star rating information such as airport queuing time and lounge comfort highly correlate with traveler satisfaction but also textual features in the form of the inferred review text sentiment. Based on our findings, we created classifiers to predict traveler satisfaction using the best performing rating features. Our results reveal that given our methodology, traveler satisfaction can be predicted with high accuracy. Additionally, we find that training a model on the sentiment of the review text provides a competitive alternative when no five star rating information is available. We believe that our work is of interest for researchers in the area of modeling and predicting user satisfaction based on available review data on the Web.
One recent work going into that direction is the one described in @cite_2 , in which the authors mined review data about airlines' in-flight services from the Skytrax portal. By grouping travelers via feature-based and clustering-based modelling, the authors showed that inferences can be captured to explain how travelers evaluate in-flight services. Another recent work of @cite_1 presented a research framework to extract and explore information on a user's opinion about airline service features from a large static corpus of online review texts.
@cite_1 @cite_2
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In this work, we propose a research framework to exploring the useful information about airline service from massive online reviews, especially, the airline service features from the customer perspective. The experimental results indicate that the proposed methods can extract information about customers' opinion about the airline service features. The common concerns as well as special features for different airline company can also be extracted efficiently from the massive online review data. Travel providers such as airlines and on-line travel agents are becoming more and more interested in understanding how passengers choose among alternative itineraries when searching for flights. This knowledge helps them better display and adapt their offer, taking into account market conditions and customer needs. Some common applications are not only filtering and sorting alternatives, but also changing certain attributes in real-time (e.g., changing the price). In this paper, we concentrate with the problem of modeling air passenger choices of flight itineraries. This problem has historically been tackled using classical Discrete Choice Modelling techniques. Traditional statistical approaches, in particular the Multinomial Logit model (MNL), is widely used in industrial applications due to its simplicity and general good performance. However, MNL models present several shortcomings and assumptions that might not hold in real applications. To overcome these difficulties, we present a new choice model based on Pointer Networks. Given an input sequence, this type of deep neural architecture combines Recurrent Neural Networks with the Attention Mechanism to learn the conditional probability of an output whose values correspond to positions in an input sequence. Therefore, given a sequence of different alternatives presented to a customer, the model can learn to point to the one most likely to be chosen by the customer. The proposed method was evaluated on a real dataset that combines on-line user search logs and airline flight bookings. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the traditional MNL model on several metrics. The ubiquitous deployment of mobile and sensor technologies has led to both the capacity to observe human behavior in physical (offline) settings as well as to record it. This provides researchers with a new lens to study and better understand the individual decision processes that were previously unobserved. In this paper, we study decision making behavior of 11,196 taxi drivers in a large Asian city using a rich data set consisting of 10.6 million fine-grained GPS trip records. These records include detailed taxi GPS trajectories, taxi occupancy data (i.e., whether a taxi was occupied with a passenger or was vacant) and taxi drivers’ daily incomes. This capacity to use data where occupancy of the taxi is known is a distinctive feature of our data set and sets this work apart from prior work which has attempted to study driver behavior. The specific decision we focus on pertains to actions drivers take to find new passengers after they have dropped off their current passengers. In particular, we study the role of information derivable from the GPS trace data (e.g., where passengers are dropped off, where passengers are picked up, longitudinal taxicab travel history with fine-grained time stamps) observable by or made available to drivers in enabling them to learn the distribution of demand for their services over space and time. We conduct our study using a heterogeneous Bayesian learning model. We find strong heterogeneity in individual learning behavior and driving decisions, which is significantly associated with individual economic outcomes. Drivers with higher incomes benefit significantly from their ability to learn from not only demand information directly observable in the local market, but also aggregate information on demand flows across markets. Interestingly, our policy simulations indicate information that is noisy at the individual level becomes valuable after being aggregated across various spatial and temporal dimensions. Moreover, the value of information does not increase monotonically with the scale and frequency of information sharing. Finally, our study has important welfare implications in that efficient information sharing leads to an income increase among all drivers, instead of a redistribution of income between different types of drivers. Our work allows us not only to explain driver decision making behavior using these detailed behavioral traces, but also to prescribe information sharing strategy for the firm in order to improve the overall market efficiency. Recently, many e-commerce websites have encouraged their users to rate shopping items and write review texts. This review information has been very useful for understanding user preferences and item properties, as well as enhancing the capability to make personalized recommendations of these websites. In this paper, we propose to model user preferences and item properties using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with dual local and global attention, motivated by the superiority of CNNs to extract complex features. By using aggregated review texts from a user and aggregated review text for an item, our model can learn the unique features (embedding) of each user and each item. These features are then used to predict ratings. We train these user and item networks jointly which enable the interaction between users and items in a similar way as matrix factorization. The local attention provides us insight on a user's preferences or an item's properties. The global attention helps CNNs focus on the semantic meaning of the whole review text. Thus, the combined local and global attentions enable an interpretable and better-learned representation of users and items. We validate the proposed models by testing on popular review datasets in Yelp and Amazon and compare the results with matrix factorization (MF), the hidden factor and topical (HFT) model, and the recently proposed convolutional matrix factorization (ConvMF+). Our proposed CNNs with dual attention model outperforms HFT and ConvMF+ in terms of mean square errors (MSE). In addition, we compare the user item embeddings learned from these models for classification and recommendation. These results also confirm the superior quality of user item embeddings learned from our model.