The cultural heritage of ancient towns serves as a testament to history and a living carrier of culture. The preservation and development of this heritage not only contribute to cultural prosperity but also promote economic and social progress. However, the current approach to developing ancient towns lacks a universal set of evaluation criteria to meet tourist needs. This study introduces an automatic classification method based on machine learning. We selected ten popular and successfully developed ancient towns in China as case studies. Using online tourist reviews as our data source, we first applied the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model to identify the core elements of cultural heritage. Following this, we used the Naive Bayes classification method to distinguish between positive and negative tourist comments. From the perspective of the tourist experience, our results show that the evaluation of ancient town cultural heritage development depends on eight key indicators, which consist of twenty specific aspects. The eight indicators are: Differentiated Landscape Experience, Architectural Atmosphere Experience, Diversity of Experience, Night-time Experience, Cultural Atmosphere Experience, Spatial Atmosphere Experience, Personal Needs, and Consumption Satisfaction. Among these, Differentiated Landscape Experience was identified as the most important factor, followed by Personal Needs. Personal Needs also represented the most positive indicator, while Consumption Satisfaction was the most negative. The research proposes and validates an evaluation framework that deeply integrates machine learning with expert knowledge, overcoming the disadvantages of manual coding, which is labor-intensive and highly subjective. Additionally, this is the first study to investigate the common elements across multiple ancient towns. The findings provide guidance for the preservation and development of cultural heritage in ancient towns and offer a valuable reference for future research.
Yu et al. (Thu,) studied this question.