Thesis Defence: Sentiment Analysis of Airlines Reviews

Hong-Jiang Sim, supervised by Dr. Paramjit Gill, will defend their thesis titled “Sentiment Analysis of Airlines Reviews” in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Computer Science.

An abstract for Hong-Jiang Sim’s thesis is included below.

Defences are open to all members of the campus community as well as the general public.

If you would like to attend this virtual defence please contact the supervisor at paramjit.gill@ubc.ca to receive a zoom link.

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ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked financial devastation for airlines. As travel restrictions eases, it is important for airlines to gather and assess the opinions of passengers in order to meet new expectations. With the availability of online electronic platforms, it has become feasible to collect customer reviews on a large scale. Collecting, processing and deciphering textual data remain a challenge to most. This thesis details the collection of textual re-view data from SkyTrax and Trip Advisor. Subsequently, it demonstrates the use of quantitative sentiment scoring of the textual reviews, exploratory data analysis and statistical modelling to ascertain factors that affect passenger perceptions of airlines services. Specifically, we developed a linear mixed model with passengers and airline as random to rank various airlines with respect to sentiment scores, while confirming fixed factors which affect these scores. The application of this model allows for interpretability to the expectations and recommendations made by various passengers of airlines, measures the performance of airlines with respect to customer experience.