Explainable Multilingual Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis for Tourism Using SHAP and LIME
Received: 16 March 2026 | Revised: 23 April 2026 | Accepted: 11 May 2026 | Online: 6 June 2026
Corresponding author: Basworo Ardi Pramono
Abstract
Online tourism analytics increasingly relies on Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) to extract fine-grained visitor perceptions; however, prior tourism ABSA studies often emphasize predictive performance while providing limited and rarely quantified evidence on explanation reliability. To address this gap, this study proposes an explainable multilingual ABSA framework for tourism reviews that combines one-vs-rest Logistic Regression (LR) with linear coefficients, SHAP, and LIME, and augments them with a quantitative trustworthiness evaluation. Experiments were conducted on a bilingual corpus of 2,891 Indonesian and English Google Reviews collected from 10 tourist destinations in Central Java and annotated into 9 multi-label classes derived from the dimensions of attractions, amenities, and accessibility, and their sentiment polarities. The selected model achieved a Macro-F1 of 0.4586, a Hamming loss of 0.1505, and an exact match of 0.2512. The global explanation analysis showed substantial agreement between the LR coefficients and SHAP rankings, with overlap@10 generally ranging from 0.70 to 0.80 across most labels. Eraser-based evaluation at = 10 preserved predictions for 0.72–1.00 of cases, indicating strong fidelity of influential features. At the local level, SHAP and LIME consistently highlighted salient tokens associated with both correct and incorrect predictions, while sanity checks showed sharp degradation under model randomization, confirming that the explanations were tied to learned model parameters rather than superficial artifacts. These findings demonstrate that multilingual tourism ABSA can be made both interpretable and quantitatively auditable, thereby providing a transparent analytical basis for tourism service evaluation, destination management, and future decision-support applications.
Keywords:
aspect-based sentiment analysis, explainable artificial intelligence, tourism analytics, SHAP, LIMEReferences
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