Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Li, Lingyao, Hu, Songhua, Shaw, Atiyya, Hemphill, Libby
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.13156
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866913322500096000
author Li, Lingyao
Hu, Songhua
Shaw, Atiyya
Hemphill, Libby
author_facet Li, Lingyao
Hu, Songhua
Shaw, Atiyya
Hemphill, Libby
contents Understanding how urban density impacts public perceptions of urban service is important for informing livable, accessible, and equitable urban planning. Conventional methods such as surveys are limited by their sampling scope, time efficiency, and expense. On the other hand, crowdsourcing through online platforms presents an opportunity for decision-makers to tap into a user-generated source of information that is widely available and cost-effective. To demonstrate such potential, we collect Google Maps reviews for 23,906 points of interest (POIs) in Atlanta, Georgia. Next, we use the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model to classify reviewers' attitudes toward urban density and the Robustly Optimized BERT approach (RoBERTa) to compute sentiment. Finally, a partial least squares regression is fitted to examine the relationships between average sentiment and socio-spatial factors. The findings reveal areas in Atlanta with predominantly negative sentiments toward urban density and highlight the variation in sentiment distribution across different POIs. Further, the regression analysis reveals that minority and low-income communities often express more negative sentiments, and higher land use density exacerbates such negativity. This study introduces a novel data source and methodological framework that can be easily adapted to different regions, offering useful insights into public sentiment toward the built environment and shedding light on how planning policies can be designed to handle related challenges.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_13156
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Crowdsourcing public attitudes toward local services through the lens of Google Maps reviews: An urban density-based perspective
Li, Lingyao
Hu, Songhua
Shaw, Atiyya
Hemphill, Libby
Social and Information Networks
Understanding how urban density impacts public perceptions of urban service is important for informing livable, accessible, and equitable urban planning. Conventional methods such as surveys are limited by their sampling scope, time efficiency, and expense. On the other hand, crowdsourcing through online platforms presents an opportunity for decision-makers to tap into a user-generated source of information that is widely available and cost-effective. To demonstrate such potential, we collect Google Maps reviews for 23,906 points of interest (POIs) in Atlanta, Georgia. Next, we use the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model to classify reviewers' attitudes toward urban density and the Robustly Optimized BERT approach (RoBERTa) to compute sentiment. Finally, a partial least squares regression is fitted to examine the relationships between average sentiment and socio-spatial factors. The findings reveal areas in Atlanta with predominantly negative sentiments toward urban density and highlight the variation in sentiment distribution across different POIs. Further, the regression analysis reveals that minority and low-income communities often express more negative sentiments, and higher land use density exacerbates such negativity. This study introduces a novel data source and methodological framework that can be easily adapted to different regions, offering useful insights into public sentiment toward the built environment and shedding light on how planning policies can be designed to handle related challenges.
title Crowdsourcing public attitudes toward local services through the lens of Google Maps reviews: An urban density-based perspective
topic Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.13156