Public Opinion Analysis of the Transportation Policy Using Social Media Data: A Case Study on the Delhi Odd–Even Policy

Thumbnail Image
Date
2019-04-01
Authors
Chakraborty, Pranamesh
Sharma, Anuj
Major Professor
Advisor
Committee Member
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Authors
Person
Sharma, Anuj
Professor
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Organizational Unit
Organizational Unit
Institute for Transportation
InTrans administers 14 centers and programs, and several other distinct research specialties, and a variety of technology transfer and professional education initiatives. More than 100 Iowa State University faculty and staff work at InTrans, and from 200 to 250 student assistants from several ISU departments conduct research while working closely with university faculty. InTrans began in 1983 as a technical assistance program for Iowa’s rural transportation agencies.
Journal Issue
Is Version Of
Versions
Series
Department
Civil, Construction and Environmental EngineeringInstitute for Transportation
Abstract

Twitter, a microblogging service, has become a popular platform for people to express their views and opinions on different issues. A sentiment analysis of the tweets can help in understanding the public opinion on different government decisions. This paper used Twitter data to extract the sentiments of people during the Phase 1 and Phase 2 of the odd–even policy implemented by the Delhi government to curb the air pollution and improve traffic flow. In this study, we used four different lexicon-based approaches: Bing, Afinn, National Research Council emotion lexicon, and Deep Recursive Neural Network-based Natural Language Processing software (CoreNLP) to extract sentiments from tweets and thereby assess overall public opinions. The daily trend obtained for each phase was normalized with the number of tweets and then compared using the Granger causality test. The causality test results showed that the trends obtained during the two phases were significantly different from each other. In particular, public sentiments were found to mostly turn negative during the later stage of the Phase 2 which indicates fading away of the public enthusiasm and positiveness towards the policy during the later stages of the policy implementation.

Comments

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Transportation in Developing Economies. The final authenticated version is available online at DOI: 10.1007/s40890-019-0074-8. Posted with permission.

Description
Keywords
Citation
DOI
Copyright
Tue Jan 01 00:00:00 UTC 2019
Collections