Ageing in the digital era: CouchSurfing for the elderly : An NLP perspective

Although the phenomenon of senior tourism is relatively recent, it has become increasingly more widespread over the last few years. Elderly people in good health are not necessarily bound to lead a sedentary life as they are interested in exploring new destinations and meeting new people. Aside from the more official routes, other alternative ways of being a traveller have recently emerged. One of them is the platform Couchsurfing.com, a social networking service that connects travellers and locals across the world. Albeit targeted at a younger audience, a community of elderly people is detectable. The goal of the present paper is that of profiling the average senior couchsurfer, unravelling the reasons why mature members choose to subscribe to this social network, and investigating the image they wish to convey when creating their accounts. The methods employed to extract and process information are based on NLP and text mining.