Investigating the Impacting Factors on the Public’s Attitudes towards Autonomous Vehicles Using Sentiment Analysis from Social Media Data

Shengzhao Wang, Meitang Li, Bo Yu (), Shan Bao and Yuren Chen
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Shengzhao Wang: Key Laboratory of Road and Traffic Engineering of the Ministry of Education, College of Transportation Engineering, Tongji University, 4800 Cao’an Highway, Shanghai 201804, China
Meitang Li: Human Factors Group, University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, 2901 Baxter Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA
Bo Yu: Key Laboratory of Road and Traffic Engineering of the Ministry of Education, College of Transportation Engineering, Tongji University, 4800 Cao’an Highway, Shanghai 201804, China
Shan Bao: Human Factors Group, University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, 2901 Baxter Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA
Yuren Chen: Key Laboratory of Road and Traffic Engineering of the Ministry of Education, College of Transportation Engineering, Tongji University, 4800 Cao’an Highway, Shanghai 201804, China

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 19, 1-17

Abstract: The attitudes of the public play a critical role in the acceptance, purchase, utilization, and research and development of autonomous vehicles (AVs). Currently, the attitudes of the public toward AVs have been mostly estimated through traditional survey data, which bears a low quantity of samples with high labor costs. It is probably also one of the reasons why the critical factors on the attitudes of the public toward AVs have not been studied from a comprehensive perspective yet. To address the issue, this study aims to propose a method by using large-scale social media data to investigate key factors that affect the attitudes of the public toward AVs. A total of 954,151 Twitter data related to AVs and 53 candidate independent variables from seven categories were extracted using the web scraping method. Then, sentiment analysis was used to measure the public attitudes towards AVs by calculating sentiment scores. Random forests algorithm was employed to preliminarily select candidate independent variables according to their importance and a linear mixed model was utilized to explore the impacting factors, considering the unobserved heterogeneities caused by the subjectivity level of tweets. The results showed that the attitudes of the public toward AVs were slightly optimistic. Factors, such as “drunk”, “blind spot”, and “mobility”, had the largest impacts on public attitudes. In addition, people were more likely to express positive feelings when talking about words, such as “lidar” and “Tesla”, related to high technologies. Conversely, factors, such as “COVID-19”, “pedestrian”, “sleepy”, and “highway”, were found to have significantly negative effects on the attitudes of the public. The findings of this study are beneficial for the development of AV technologies, the guidelines for AV-related policy formulation, and the understanding and acceptance of the public toward AVs.

Keywords: autonomous vehicles; social media data; public attitudes; sentiment analysis; linear mixed model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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