Resolving local cuisines for tourists with multi-source social media contents

Abstract

Social media are playing an increasingly important role as information sources for tourists. However, the research on increasing the accessibility of social media for tourists is sparse. In this work, we study local cuisine as a specific application of the problem. At the social media side, food has become one of the highest rated topics with the popularity of mobile devices. Texts, photos, and videos about various cuisines are produced when people tweet, blog, and interact with friends in the social networks in their daily life. On the other hand, tourists often encounter cuisine names that they have difficulties in understanding the meanings, even with the help of a dictionary. Comprehensive heterogenous social media contents about local cuisines thus can greatly help in filling the gap. In this work, we propose utilizing the multi-source social media contents to resolve the local cuisines for tourists. The overall approach consists of two major components. First, a location-aware linking module is built to resolve the cuisine names, especially the pseudonym issue where the same food is known differently in various contexts. Second, given the resolved cuisine names, a location-aware aggregation module is designed to compile the relevant social media contents in various media forms. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the two modules. Furthermore, a user study shows that both the linking module and the aggregation module are helpful for tourists entering localities of new food.