Exploring public perception of urban heritage in Macao via user-generated content

Public perception of the Historic Centre of Macao, as reflected in user-generated content on travel and map platforms, reveals a strong positive sentiment with a focus on churches, squares, facades, gardens, walking, and photography. While this aligns primarily with UNESCO's Outstanding Universal Value (OUV) criteria—particularly Criterion (iv) for material urban fabric and architectural ensembles—it also highlights concerns like crowding and commercialisation not addressed by the OUV framework. The study employed a multi-modal approach, analysing multilingual reviews using sentiment classification, semantic keyterm extraction, and an OUV alignment pipeline, alongside visual theme grouping of user-uploaded images via pretrained vision models. This method demonstrated partial overlap between textual and visual signals, offering insights that could enhance monitoring and communication for urban World Heritage sites.

Wei, Y. (2026). Exploring public perception of urban heritage in Macao via user-generated content. University of Zurich. https://doi.org/10.5167/UZH-435929