User Engagement through Topic Modelling in Travel

Published in KDD 2014 by Athanasios Noulas and Mats Einarsen

Paper: http://www.ueo-workshop.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/noulasKDD2014.pdf

Booking.com engages its users in different ways, like for example email campaigns or on-site recommendations, in which the user receives suggestions for the destination of their next trip. This engagement is data-driven, and its parameters emerge from the corresponding relevant past behavioural pattern of users in the form of collaborative filtering or other recommender algorithms. In this work we use a secondary database with meta-information about the recommended destination in the form of user endorsements. We model the endorsements using Latent Dirichlet allocation, a well-known principled probabilistic framework, and use the resulting latent space to optimise user engagement. We demonstrate measurable benefits in two distinct interactions with the user in the form of email marketing and menu-based website browsing.