Mining Online User-Generated Content: Using Sentiment Analysis Technique to Study Hotel Service Quality

This study aims to look beyond the quantitative summary to provide a more comprehensive view of online user-generated content. We obtain a unique and extensive dataset of online user reviews for hotels across various review sites and over a long time periods. We use the sentiment analysis technique to decompose user reviews into five dimensions to measure hotel service quality. Those dimensions are then incorporated into econometrics models to examine their effect in shaping users' overall evaluation and content generating behavior. The results suggest that different dimensions of user reviews have significantly differential impact in forming user evaluation and driving content generation.