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AET Transport and Mobility Forum

The AET Transport and Mobility Forum promotes active engagement of AET members and member-groups with each other and with other like-minded transport organisations through supporting and hosting a range of activities including online webinars, seminars and discussions on a wide range of transport and transport related topics of interest. We welcome new members and new ideas about transport and how we talk about transport.

Upcoming webinar

An Integrated Framework of Social Media Opinion Mining and Category System to Analyse Public Opinion Towards Transportation Technology and Services

Presented by the Winner of the Jacobs Award for the paper demonstrating the most innovative use of data at the European Transport Conference 2023

FREE Webinar: Thursday, 4 April 2024
11.00 - 12.00 CEST / 10.00 - 11.00 BST

Robust content analysis pertaining to new transportation technologies or public transport services through social media opinion mining offers an alternative methodology to the conventional way of collecting and analysing public opinions to facilitate transportation policy planning and management.

The objective of this research is to demonstrate: a) the capability of sentiment analysis and topic modelling as an efficient alternative in capturing the temporal trend of sentiments and opinions; b) the potential of this technique to reveal latent factors or relationships that could possibly influence the user perceptions towards the research object; and c) the valuable insights obtained from the Twitter data to facilitate the discussion of the policy implications and the recommendation of measures.

A novel framework which integrates the opinion mining results from the unsupervised machine learning models (Valence Aware Dictionary for sEntiment Reasoning and Latent Dirichlet Allocation) into the category system to extract public opinions and sentiments that could aid in the understanding of the users’ key concerns regarding the research object, autonomous vehicles (AV).

A two-year (2018-2019) sample of 2,376,839 tweets was extracted from the Twitter data pool via generic hashtag queries. After removing irrelevant tweets, a total of 359,118 tweets in 2018 and 205,040 tweets in 2019 were used for the data processing. Performance of the proposed models was validated against 167 manually annotated held-out dataset where 50% accuracy was achieved for sentiment classification and 34% accuracy was achieved for topic inference at the document-level. The accuracy of the human classified sentiment achieved between 44%-51% whereas the human classified topics achieved between 51%-66% amongst the five human annotators.

Factors that could have influenced the users’ sentiments were analyzed for its impact on posterior polarity and topic inference using the one-way ANOVA hypothesis testing. Content analysis was achieved by integrating computational linguistics into the category system.

The research demonstrated that it is promising to use the proposed novel framework of integrating computational linguistics and the category system via the social media data to monitor users’ preferences towards the research object in a cost-effective, time-saving and resource-efficient manner, which could aid interested stakeholders in planning and decision-making.

The research was concluded with discussing the policy implication and recommendation, the limitation of the methodology and areas of where further research is required.

Jacobs LogoThis webinar is co-hosted by Jacobs, along with the AET Data Programme Committee, and will be moderated by Hermann Maier, Jacobs UK, with commentary from Prutha Shah, Jacobs UK

The FREE webinar is organised by the AET Transport and Mobility Forum and will be hosted on the Zoom platform.

Speakers Bio

Katherine Cai

Xuefen Cai, MSc(Eng), MIES, CEng(SG)

Assistant Chief Specialist, Intelligent Transport Methodologies Road and Traffic Specialists
Manager, Intelligent Transport Systems Development (TT)

Xuefen graduated from the National University of Singapore with the Bachelor of Engineering (Civil) in 2006 and from Tongji University of Shanghai, China in 2021 with a Masters in Transportation Engineering, specialising in traffic information and control. She has more than 15 years of work experience in LTA and had contributed in the field of traffic design and management, ITS development, ITS standards, data quality, governance & management and business intelligence analytics. She had been involved in several transport computational science research such as the social media sentiment analysis and topic modelling leveraging on users perceptions towards transportation technologies, data fusion techniques (LSTM and multiple linear regression algorithm) and free-flow speed estimation techniques (maximum-likelihood estimation). She is also an Institution of Engineers Singapore (IES) Chartered Engineer (Transportation).

 

Future TMF Webinars and Events

Date Topic/Theme Presenters
4th April 2024

An integrated framework of social media opinion mining and category system to analyse public opinion towards transportation technologies and services

Xuefen Cai

2nd May 2024 Mobility in a Rapidly Changing World TMF Panel
6th June 2024 Joint Webinar with Journal of Urban Mobility (JUM) JUM/TMF Panel
4th July 2024 Freight and Logistics – Technology Choices Co-Hosted with YRPF

Previous Sessions (available to members only)

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