Social Media Mining with Fuzzy Text Matching: A Knowledge Extraction on Tourism After COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Social media mining is an emerging technique for analyzing data to extract valuable knowledge related to various domains. However, traditional text matching techniques, such as exact matching, are not always suitable for social media data, which can contain spelling mistakes, abbreviations, and variations in the use of words. Fuzzy matching is a text matching technique that can handle such variations and identify similarities between two texts, even if there are differences in spelling or phrasing. The gap in existing research is the limited use of fuzzy matching in social media mining for tourism recovery analysis. By applying fuzzy matching to social media data related to COVID-19 and tourism recovery, this research seeks to bridge this gap and extract valuable insights related to the impact of the pandemic on tourism recovery. We manually retrieved 19,462 Twitter records and differentiated the data sources using four diver parameters to indicate data related to the impact of COVID-19 on the tourism industry, such as the economy, restrictions, government policies, and vaccination. We conducted text mining analysis on the collected 7,352 words and identified 25 highly recommended words that indicated COVID-19 recovery from a tourism perspective. We separated the four words representing the tourism perspective to perform fuzzy matching as a dataset. We then used the inbound dataset on the fuzzy matching process, with the 7,352-word data collected from the text mining process. The matching process resulted in 18 words representing COVID-19 recovery from a tourism perspective.