Mining and Visualizing Local Experiences from Blog Entries

We describe a way to extract visitors' experiences from Weblogs (blogs) and also a way to mine and visualize activities of visitors at sightseeing spots. A system using our proposed method mines association rules between locations, time periods, and types of experiences out of blog entries. Association rules between experiences are also extracted. We constructed a local information search system that enables the user to specify a location, a time period, or a type of experience in a search query and find relevant Web content. Results of experiments showed that three proposed refinement algorithms applied to a conventional text mining method raises the precision and recall of the extracted rules.