Understanding Public Sentiment toward I-710 Corridor Project from Social Media Based on Natural Language Processing

摘要

With many social media platforms like Twitter gaining popularity, extremely large amounts of user-generated content are becoming available online. These contents are closely related to the preferences, attitudes and beliefs of the general public on a particular topic. To provide Caltrans with opinions from Twitter users on the five alternatives of the 710 Corridor Project, we investigate relevant tweets from 2009 to August 3, 2015, analyze how public sentiment evolves over time, and examine the general sentiment for the five alternatives. The results can be used as a reference for the decision-makers to select the most acceptable alternative for the 710 Project in the future.