End User Advisory Board, 1st Workshop

The End User Advisory Board shapes the creation of OpeNER, giving feedback on users’ functional needs and evaluating the product. It consists of Tourist Boards, travel portals and industry experts, who explained their current challenges in opinion mining. The OpeNER’s End User Advisory Board’s 1st Workshop took place in San Sebastian on September 13-14, 2012. The End User Advisory Board The End User Advisory Board (EUAB) comprises tourism organizations, tourism portals, and experts from the industry and research communities. EUAB members are shaping the development of the OpeNER suite. They provide insight about their functional needs as end users, and evaluate to what an extent the products created within OpeNER respond to those needs. The EUAB’s feedback is one of the factors that informs project decisions. The EUAB is composed of the following members: Tourism Boards at National, Regional and Local levels * Segittur: the State Agency for Tourism in Spain. * Fondazione Sistema Toscana: Official Tourism Agency for the Region of Tuscany, Italy. * Amsterdam Tourism and Convention Board: Local Tourism Agency. * Tourism Portals * TripAdvisor * Trivago Additional Experts * Yahoo Research * Ispra JRC: EU’s Joint Research Commission site at Ispra, Italy * Bitext: provider of Natural Language Processing Technologies What was the Workshop about?

EUAB members are facing challenges monitoring and analyzing opinions coming from their portals and from social media channels. Each member presented their current social media monitoring practices and their needs in terms of sentiment analysis and opinion mining. Some of the challenges mentioned by end users are the volume of content to analyze, as well as the difficulties involved in monitoring the content with little staff or little infrastructure. One of the functional needs identified was the ability to filter and classify conversations by target markets or target profiles. Thus, Named Entity Extraction needs to be adapted to each target market or targeted traveler profile. A need for dealing with cultural differences among tourists when analyzing sentiment was also recognized. Some expectations and preferences depend on the cultural background on the tourist, and scoring reviews for sentiment should take this into account. The workshop also included an explanation of the current OpeNER prototype.