Understanding sentiment changes in tourist flow is critical in designing exciting experiences for tourists and promoting sustainable tourism development. This paper proposes a novel analytical framework to investigate the tourist sentiment changes between different attractions based on geotagged social media data. Our framework mainly focuses on visualizing the detailed sentiment changes of tourists and exploring the valuable spatiotemporal pattern of the sentiment changes in tourist flow. The tourists were first identified from social media users. Then, we accurately evaluated the tourist sentiment by constructing a Chinese sentiment dictionary, grammatical rule, and sentiment score. Based on the location information of social media data, we built and visualized the tourist flow network. Last, to further reveal the impact of attractions on the sentiment of tourist flow, the positive and negative sentiment profiles were generated by mining social media texts. We took Beijing, a famous tourist destination in China, as a case study. Our results revealed the following: (1) the temporal trend of tourist sentiment has seasonal characteristics and is significantly influenced by government control policies against COVID-19; (2) due to the impact of the attraction’s historical background, some tourist flows with highly decreased sentiment strength are linked to attractions; (3) on the long journey to the attraction, the sentiment strength of tourists decreases; and (4) bad traffic conditions can significantly decrease tourist sentiment. This study highlights the methodological implications of visualizing sentiment changes during collective tourist movement and provides comprehensive insight into the spatiotemporal pattern of tourist sentiment.

The development of location-based services facilitates the use of location data for detecting urban events. Currently, most studies based on location data model the pattern of an urban dynamic and then extract the anomalies, which deviate significantly from the pattern as urban events. However, few studies have considered the long temporal dependency of sentiment strength in geotagged social media data, and thus it is difficult to further improve the reliability of detection results. In this paper, we combined a sentiment analysis method and long short-term memory neural network for detecting urban events with geotagged social media data. We first applied a dictionary-based method to evaluate the positive and negative sentiment strength. Based on long short-term memory neural network, the long temporal dependency of sentiment strength in geotagged social media data was constructed. By considering the long temporal dependency, daily positive and negative sentiment strength are predicted. We extracted anomalies that deviated significantly from the prediction as urban events. For each event, event-related information was obtained by analyzing social media texts. Our results indicate that the proposed approach is a cost-effective way to detect urban events, such as festivals, COVID-19-related events and traffic jams. In addition, compared to existing methods, we found that accounting for a long temporal dependency of sentiment strength can significantly improve the reliability of event detection.