Recently, Tourism Management, the premier international journal in the field, officially published a collaborative study titled From words to growth: Unveiling government attention to tourism from natural language processing. The paper was co-authored by Professor Huang Xijia’s team from Nanchang University and Professor Yang Yang from Temple University (USA). Notably, this marks the first time the School of Tourism at Nanchang University has published in this prestigious journal.

Tourism Management is widely recognized as one of the top three authoritative journals in the field. It is rated as an ABS 4-star journal, an FMS Class A journal, and a Tier 1 (Top) journal by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). With a 2024 Impact Factor of 12.4 and a 5-year Impact Factor of 13.6, it ranks 1st globally in the JCR category of “Hospitality, Leisure, Sport & Tourism” and 7th in the broader category of “Management”.

This publication represents the latest achievement by the Nanchang University research team regarding the allocation of government attention and regional tourism growth. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach, the study integrates Large Language Models (LLMs), text analysis, word embedding, high-dimensional causal inference, and Double Machine Learning (DML). By constructing a quantified index of government attention to tourism, the researchers verified a significant causal relationship between this attention, tourism-related investment, and regional tourism growth. Furthermore, the paper provides a comprehensive technical roadmap and open-source code for indicator calculation, offering a valuable guide for future AI-driven tourism research.

Led by Professor Huang Xijia, the tourism research team at Nanchang University has long been dedicated to the study of red tourism, eco-tourism, rural tourism, and tourism enterprise management. Over the past three years, the team has published more than 20 papers in renowned domestic and international journals, including Tourism Management, Energy Economics, Managerial and Decision Economics, Journal of Cleaner Production, Statistical Research (in Chinese), Finance & Trade Economics (in Chinese), Chinese Rural Economy (in Chinese), Tourism Tribune (in Chinese), and Tourism Science (in Chinese).

Link to the paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2025.105264