Exploring emotion differences in tourist attractions based on online travel notes: a case study in Nanjing, China

Emotional experience is an important topic in the field of tourism research. Current studies have paid less attention to the emotion differences in tourist attractions. This paper analyzes the emotion type and theme differences in eleven categories of tourist attractions. Nanjing, was selected as the study area. Ten main travel emotion types and five travel emotion themes applied to Chinese texts were proposed, expanding the dimension of existing travel emotions. The framework of travel emotion type and theme extraction was constructed by natural language processing and the deep learning method. The results verified that different categories of tourist attractions trigger obvious emotional differences and highlighted the detailed emotion types and theme differences in eleven categories in the case area of Nanjing. The research revealed that cultural background determines the emotional types of tourist attractions, and service functions determine the diversity of emotions. Meanwhile, the clustering analysis results show that some tourist attractions belonging to the same category have different emotional characteristics.