Automatic Compilation of an Online Travel Portal from Automatically Extracted Travel Blog Entries

For travelers who plan to visit a particular tourist spot, information about it is required. In this paper, we propose a method for extracting and organizing appropriate information from weblogs (blogs). Recently, increased numbers of travelers have been writing of their travel experiences via blogs. We call these travel blog entries, and they contain much useful travel information. For example, some bloggers introduce useful web sites for a tourist spot, while others report on transportation between tourist spots. Here, we extract hyperlinks of web sites for tourist spots from travel blog entries and organize them via automatic classification. We also extract transportation information automatically from travel blog entries. To investigate the effectiveness of our method, we conducted experiments. For the extraction of transportation information, we obtained an 80.3% for Precision. For the classification of hyperlinks, we obtained a high Precision. Finally, we constructed a prototype system, which provides information about (1) transportation between tourist spots and (2) useful web sites for tourist spots.