A Sentiment Analysis Approach for Evaluation of Events in Field of Cultural Heritage

Italy boasts one of the largest and priceless set of Cultural Heritage and touristic places in the world. Cultural Heritage in Italy, in fact, is an invaluable resource that must be protected, preserved and promoted by inserting it in the digital ecosystem of a Smart City, where economic, tourist, recreational and logistic aspects are all considered together. The adoption of Future Internet (FI) technology, and of its most challenging components like the Internet of Things (IoT) and the Internet of Services (IoS), can constitute the basic building blocks to progress towards a unified ICT platform for the distribution of a variety of applications within the smart city vision. In this scenario, an effective contribute can be furnished by sentiment analysis. Also called Opinion Mining, Sentiment Analysis is usually defined as the task of extracting the opinions of authors from given pieces of text and to label them in different categories (such as positive or negative). In this paper a novel approach to sentiment analysis is introduced with the aim to grab from the web information about the experience of users inside cultural heritage sites. In this way new services can be offered: managers of the sites can easily understand what is going well or not. Tourists can select sites that reflect a good mood. The proposed service can be considered as a sort of a Sentiment TripAdvisor that reflects, in an automatic way, the experience of users inside a Cultural Heritage Site. The first experimental results are very promising.