Discovery of Subjective Evaluations of Product Features in Hotel Reviews

Tourism is a dynamic and growing industry, with the Internet offering a multitude of new ways of conducting tourism business and promoting tourism destinations (World Tourism Organization, 2007). As the Forrester Research reported in 2005, in Europe 40% of users of tourism services book their travels on the Web. However, current information technologies are hardly capable of making full use of the potential of the Web for tourism business. Traditional search engines do not provide users efficient means to access the information they require, retrieving vast numbers of web pages in response to queries expressed in keywords. Instead, users often want specific and brief answers to complex queries like “Tell me the telephone numbers of Hilton Birmingham Hotel” or “What are the major places of interest in the Black Country”. The purpose of the EU-funded QALL-ME project, is to address this need by providing an information facility to that accepts natural language questions from users interested in tourism services and retrieves succinct answers to them from the Web.