Comparing Habitants' and Visitors' Perceptions of Places via Social Media Reviews

Abstract In this paper, we emphasise that people with different personal experiences develop different perceptions of particular places in New Orleans. We distinguish between habitants of and visitors to that city based on users’ digital footprints provided by social media data (Yelp). Afterwards, we apply the Long-Short-Term-Memory method to capture people’s feelings, either positive or negative, about different places. We further employ term frequency/inverse document frequency to explain the place-specific characteristics that elicit differing feelings among habitants and visitors. Ultimately, we aim to contribute to the literature on place semantics by linking place-specific characteristics to the emotional experiences of different people.