A novel English/Chinese information retrieval approach in hotel website searching

In the existing tourism and hospitality literature, the issue of cross-lingual information retrieval (IR) has been completely overlooked by researchers. In view of the positive financial return in e-tourism business, this paper presents a novel approach that incorporates the longest common subsequence (LCS) to automatically translate an English phrase into Chinese characters in cross-lingual hotel IR. Experiments were conducted to investigate the performance of the proposed method using websites from hotel members of the Hong Kong Hotel Association as the test samples. The precision of a pilot experiment is 100% while the recall is 88.4%. Additionally, 200 subjects were invited to evaluate the system. All subjects agreed with different levels that the system can provide useful, accurate and up-to-date Hong Kong hotel information. With the initial success, the proposed approach is expected to contribute to the removal of language barriers for e-tourism. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.