Sentiment analysis of TripAdvisor comments for Iranian restaurants with a deep learning approach

The growth of the Internet, social networks and e-commerce websites provide a platform for users to express their opinions. In recent years, many users have expressed their positive or negative opinions about food, service, and quality and restaurant atmosphere online. These comments are very important for the decision of other users as well as restaurants to maintain quality, product development and their brand. Sentiment analysis is a natural language processing approach and allows systematic analysis of users' opinions. Due to the importance of this issue, the purpose of this study is to present a model for analyzing the sentiment of TripAdvisor's comments about Iranian restaurants. In this research, we propose an aspect-based sentiment analysis based on a deep learning algorithm which is the standard long short-term memory neural network to extract users' sentiments about restaurants. To teach the model, 4000 comments were labeled according to four aspects in three classes of not related, positive and negative, and the study steps were done based on Crisp methodology. Accuracy for food, service, value and atmosphere were 82%, 86%, 87% and 81%, respectively. These results indicate the efficiency and acceptable performance of the model for aspect-based sentiment analysis of restaurants. Furthermore, food and atmosphere are the most important aspects for the customers of Iranian restaurants, respectively. Restaurant owners can use the developed model to gain a competitive advantage and find their strengths and weaknesses.