Analysis of User-Generated Content in Visitor Reviews of Tourist Attractions Using Semantic Similarity

Abstract

Online tourist reviews, a major form of user-generated content (UGC), are often short and unstructured, complicating the identification of tourist experience dimensions and their relationships. This study presents an integrated framework combining Topic-RoBERTa, topic-level semantic network analysis, and Graph Attention Networks (GAT) to extract experience topics and model their semantic associations. The authors validated the framework on 186,429 reviews from the OD-TripM TripAdvisor review dataset released by the Data Science and Computational Intelligence (DaSCI) research group on GitHub and the Yelp Open Dataset, identifying 12 tourist experience dimensions and constructing a community-structured semantic network. The results show that the proposed method can extract interpretable topics, reveal fine-grained attention-weighted associations, and provide a more structured understanding of tourist experiences. The findings offer valuable insights for tourism management and service optimization.