Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis using Long Short-term Memory Model for Leveraging Restaurant Service Management

In general, the hospitality industry has been acknowledged as a major sector that gives a high contribution to economic development in many countries including Indonesia. For that reason, many initiatives have been implemented to help the growth of the hospitality industry in many countries including Indonesia to rebound from the harsh impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic. One such initiative is improving restaurant services as the main sector of the hospitality industry. This paper presents empirical results of sentiment analysis as a means to assess the quality of restaurant services as the first step to improving service quality. In particular, this study explores the aspect-based sentiment analysis method to identify some aspects of restaurant service which need improvement by learning the polarity of customers toward the restaurant services without having to meet the customers directly. By using the aspect-based sentiment analysis method, the customer sentiments comprising opinions, sentiments, evaluations, attitudes, and emotions from restaurant service can be analyzed using customers’ online reviews as input. The main experiment findings showed that the Long Short-term Memory model can achieve high performance in predicting aspect polarization in restaurant service reviews. Other findings suggest that Sigmoid as an activation function achieved 0.97 average training accuracy and 0.69 average testing accuracy giving a better performance to the model in comparison to ReLU, Tanh, and ELU activation functions.