ANALYZING TOURIST SENTIMENT AND TOPICS IN MALAYSIAN DESTINATION TWEETS: INSIGHTS FOR SUSTAINABLE TOURISM MANAGEMENT IN PENANG
Keywords:
Covid-19, Sentiment analysis, Sustainable tourism, Sustainability, Topic modellingAbstract
This research aims to analyse the opinions expressed in tweets about a tourism destination in Malaysia and elucidate the dominant topics discussed on Twitter. This study analyses tourist sentiment on a Malaysian destination from a sustainability perspective by examining tweets using Lexicon-based sentiment analysis for polarity detection and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) for topic modelling. A total of 18,018 tweets about Penang Tourism revealed that 46% of sentiments were positive, 39% were neutral, and 15% were negative. Tourists primarily discussed food, tourist spots, events, hotels, traffic, and driver attitudes. Core tourism services received positive feedback, whereas additional fees were noted as less favourable. These insights provide useful information for policymakers and businesses to understand tourist behaviour and expectations, supporting sustainable tourism practices and resource management.
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