Celebrating the 45th Anniversary of the University of Macau:
GenAI and LLMs: The Need for Tourism-Specific Models
Prof. Cathy HSU
Chair Professor, School of Hotel and Tourism Management
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Date: 30 March 2026 (Monday)
Time: 14:00-15:30
Venue: E22-1030
Host: Prof. Hyunsu KIM, Assistant Professor in Integrated Resort and Tourism Management
Abstract
Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) have become increasingly popular research tools among tourism scholars. Although these technologies hold significant potential to advance research, they also present notable limitations. This seminar highlights the need for tourism-specific LLMs and demonstrates the superior performance of pre-trained language models based on human-annotated tourism datasets enriched with domain knowledge. Evidence from studies on sentence-level and aspect-level sentiment analysis, as well as emotion analysis, using social media data underscores the advantages of smaller, tourism-focused LLMs. These findings lay the groundwork for developing a tourism-specific GenAI capable of leveraging multilingual and multimodal data.
Speaker
Professor Cathy Hsu joined the School of Hotel and Tourism Management in July 2001. Previously, she was a professor at Kansas State University. Prior to that, she was on faculty at Iowa State University for 9 years. She is the co-author of the book, Tourism: The Business of Hospitality and Travel, published in 2018 and lead author of the books Tourism Marketing: An Asia-Pacific Perspective, published in 2008 by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd., and Marketing Hospitality, published in 2001 by John Wiley and Sons. Her research foci have been hospitality and tourism marketing, tourist behaviors, resident sentiment and stereotypes, hotel branding, and service quality. She has obtained numerous extramural and intramural grants and has over 300 refereed publications. She has served as a consultant to various tourism organizations, such as the World Tourism Organization, Hong Kong Tourism Board, Garden Hotels in Guangzhou, and Kansas Travel and Tourism Development Division.
Professor Hsu is the Editor-in-Chief of Tourism Management and was the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Teaching in Travel and Tourism for 16 years. She received the John Wiley & Sons Lifetime Research Achievement Award in 2009 and International Society of Travel and Tourism Educator’s Martin Oppermann Memorial Award for Lifetime Contribution to Tourism Education in 2011.
All are welcome!
