A Tourism Recommender System Based on Collaboration and Text Analysis

This work presents a recommender system that helps travel agents in discovering options for customers, especially those who do not know where to go and what to do. The system analyzes textual messages exchanged between a travel agent and a customer through a private Web chat. Text mining techniques help discover interesting areas in the messages. After that, the system searches a database and retrieves tourist options (like cities and attractions) classified in these interesting areas. The system makes use of a tourism ontology, containing themes and a controlled vocabulary, to identify themes in the textual messages. The system acts as a decision support system, because it does not make recommendations directly to the customer.