Optimizing Sentiment Analysis for Lombok Tourism Using SMOTE and Chi-Square with Machine Learning

Tourism is a vital economic sector for Lombok Island, which is renowned for its natural beauty and cultural richness as a top destination. The rapid growth of tourism in Lombok requires a deep understanding of tourists' perceptions and sentiments to ensure an optimal service quality. The sentiment analysis of online reviews is valuable for identifying service strengths and weaknesses and addressing tourists' needs more effectively. This not only enhances tourist satisfaction, but also aids in the design of more effective marketing strategies. However, text data analysis from online reviews presents unique challenges such as noise, class imbalance, and numerous features that may affect classification results. Therefore, this study aims to classify tourist sentiment toward Lombok tourism using machine learning methods combined with feature selection and oversampling techniques. This study focuses on optimizing sentiment analysis of tourism-related tweets using a combination of SMOTE oversampling and Chi-Square feature selection on improving classification performance without hyperparameter tuning. The study applies machine learning methods, such as SVM and Naïve Bayes, with feature selection and oversampling using Chi-Square and SMOTE. The dataset used was sentiment data regarding Lombok tourism obtained from Twitter in 2023, consisting of 940 instances divided into three classes: Negative, Neutral, and Positive. The research findings show that the use of SMOTE and Chi-Square can improve the accuracy of the SVM and Naive Bayes methods. Without optimization, the SVM method achieved an accuracy of 73.93% and a Naive Bayes of 67.02%. After optimization with SMOTE and Chi-Square, the accuracy increased for SVM by 90% and Naive Bayes by 84% to classify tourist sentiment towards Lombok tourism. The implications indicate that combining data balancing using SMOTE with feature selection via Chi-Square effectively improves the performance of sentiment classification models for tourist opinions on Lombok's tourism.