Determination of Motivating Factors of Urban Forest Visitors through Latent Dirichlet Allocation Topic Modeling

Doo-San Kim, Byeong-Cheol Lee and Kwang-Hi Park
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Doo-San Kim: Graduate School of Tourism, Event, and Convention Management, Kyonggi University, Seoul 03746, Korea
Byeong-Cheol Lee: Graduate School of Tourism, Event, and Convention Management, Kyonggi University, Seoul 03746, Korea
Kwang-Hi Park: Department of Nursing, Gachon University, Incheon 21936, Korea

IJERPH, 2021, vol. 18, issue 18, 1-14

Abstract: Despite the unique characteristics of urban forests, the motivating factors of urban forest visitors have not been clearly differentiated from other types of the forest resource. This study aims to identify the motivating factors of urban forest visitors, using latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling based on social big data. A total of 57,449 cases of social text data from social blogs containing the keyword “urban forest” were collected from Naver and Daum, the major search engines in South Korea. Then, 17,229 cases were excluded using morpheme analysis and stop word elimination; 40,110 cases were analyzed to identify the motivating factors of urban forest visitors through LDA topic modeling. Seven motivating factors—“Cafe-related Walk”, “Healing Trip”, “Daily Leisure”, “Family Trip”, “Wonderful View”, “Clean Space”, and “Exhibition and Photography”—were extracted; each contained five keywords. This study elucidates the role of forests as a place for healing, leisure, and daily exercise. The results suggest that efforts should be made toward developing various programs regarding the basic functionality of urban forests as a natural resource and a unique place to support a diversity of leisure and cultural activities.

Keywords: urban forest; motivation; LDA; topic modeling; scale development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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