In this paper, we present a real-world conversational AI system to search for and book hotels through text messaging. Our architecture consists of a frame-based dialogue management system, which calls machine learning models for intent classification, named entity recognition, and information retrieval subtasks. Our chatbot has been deployed on a commercial scale, handling tens of thousands of hotel searches every day. We describe the various opportunities and challenges of developing a chatbot in the travel industry.
Natural language processing has been applied to other problems in the travel industry, for example, text mining hotel information from user reviews for a recommendation system @cite_12 , or determining the economic importance of various hotel characteristics @cite_16 . Sentiment analysis techniques have been applied to hotel reviews for classifying polarity @cite_13 and identifying common complaints to report to hotel management @cite_3 .
@cite_3 @cite_16 @cite_13 @cite_12
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The analysis of user reviews has become critical in research and industry, as user reviews increasingly impact the reputation of products and services. Many review texts comprise an involved argumentation with facts and opinions on different product features or aspects. Therefore, classifying sentiment polarity does not suffice to capture a review's impact. We claim that an argumentation analysis is needed, including opinion summarization, sentiment score prediction, and others. Since existing language resources to drive such research are missing, we have designed the ArguAna TripAdvisor corpus, which compiles 2,100 manually annotated hotel reviews balanced with respect to the reviews' sentiment scores. Each review text is segmented into facts, positive, and negative opinions, while all hotel aspects and amenities are marked. In this paper, we present the design and a first study of the corpus. We reveal patterns of local sentiment that correlate with sentiment scores, thereby defining a promising starting point for an effective argumentation analysis. This paper studied generating natural languages at particular contexts or situations. We proposed two novel approaches which encode the contexts into a continuous semantic representation and then decode the semantic representation into text sequences with recurrent neural networks. During decoding, the context information are attended through a gating mechanism, addressing the problem of long-range dependency caused by lengthy sequences. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches on user review data, in which rich contexts are available and two informative contexts, sentiments and products, are selected for evaluation. Experiments show that the fake reviews generated by our approaches are very natural. Results of fake review detection with human judges show that more than 50 of the fake reviews are misclassified as the real reviews, and more than 90 are misclassified by existing state-of-the-art fake review detection algorithm. Recommender system offers personalized suggestions by analyzing user preference. However, the performance falls sharply when it encounters sparse data, especially meets a cold start user. Hotel is such kind of goods that suffers a lot from sparsity issue due to extremely low rating frequency. In order to handle these issues, this paper proposes a novel hotel recommendation framework. The main contribution includes: 1) We combine collaboration filtering (CF) with content-based (CBF) method to overcome sparsity issue, while ensuring high accuracy. 2) Travel intents are introduced to provide additional information for user preference analysis. 3) To provide as broad as possible recommendations, diversity techniques are employed. 4) Several experiments are conducted on the real Ctrip1 dataset, the results show that the proposed hybrid framework is competitive against classical approaches. User-generated content on social media platforms and product search engines is changing the way consumers shop for goods online. However, current product search engines fail to effectively leverage information created across diverse social media platforms. Moreover, current ranking algorithms in these product search engines tend to induce consumers to focus on one single product characteristic dimension (e.g., price, star rating). This approach largely ignores consumers' multidimensional preferences for products. In this paper, we propose to generate a ranking system that recommends products that provide, on average, the best value for the consumer's money. The key idea is that products that provide a higher surplus should be ranked higher on the screen in response to consumer queries. We use a unique data set of U.S. hotel reservations made over a three-month period through Travelocity, which we supplement with data from various social media sources using techniques from text mining, image classification, social geotagging, human annotations, and geomapping. We propose a random coefficient hybrid structural model, taking into consideration the two sources of consumer heterogeneity the different travel occasions and different hotel characteristics introduce. Based on the estimates from the model, we infer the economic impact of various location and service characteristics of hotels. We then propose a new hotel ranking system based on the average utility gain a consumer receives from staying in a particular hotel. By doing so, we can provide customers with the “best-value” hotels early on. Our user studies, using ranking comparisons from several thousand users, validate the superiority of our ranking system relative to existing systems on several travel search engines. On a broader note, this paper illustrates how social media can be mined and incorporated into a demand estimation model in order to generate a new ranking system in product search engines. We thus highlight the tight linkages between user behavior on social media and search engines. Our interdisciplinary approach provides several insights for using machine learning techniques in economics and marketing research.