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

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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.

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the opportunity provided by the 4th Conference of the Transportation Research Group of India (4th CTRG) held at IIT Bombay, Mumbai, India between 17th December, 2017 and 20th December, 2017 to present the work that forms the basis of this manuscript. The authors also gratefully acknowledge the help provided by Aditya Raj and Abhinav Prakash in downloading Twitter dataset used in this study.

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  1. Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering, Iowa State University, Ames, USA

    Pranamesh Chakraborty & Anuj Sharma

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  1. Pranamesh Chakraborty
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  2. Anuj Sharma
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Correspondence to Pranamesh Chakraborty.

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Chakraborty, P., Sharma, A. Public Opinion Analysis of the Transportation Policy Using Social Media Data: A Case Study on the Delhi Odd–Even Policy. Transp. in Dev. Econ. 5, 5 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40890-019-0074-8

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