Exploring Topics and Trends in Service Robots, Artificial Intelligence, and Realities in Tourism: A Text-Mining Approach

This exploratory study examined how service robots (SR), artificial intelligence (AI), and various forms of reality (mediated reality, augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality, and multimediated reality) have been studied in the tourism industry using a text-mining approach based on machine learning (ML) algorithms. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) modelling was used to investigate topics in academic literature related to these three technological capabilities in the tourism industry. Topic dispersion in low-dimensional space was visualized using t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) modeling. Trends for all topics were identified using a five-year regression analysis of published literature and eight critical topics were identified from computations using the LDA modeling and expert opinions. From this, four broad prospective future research areas that academics might concentrate on (intelligent systems and technology in hospitality and tourism, backend ML-AI integration, frontend ML-AI integration, and mixed, mediated, and multimediated reality integration) were identified.