Feasibility Study on Detection of Transportation Information Exploiting Twitter as a Sensor

Abstract

The concept of a smart community has recently been attracting great attention as a means of utilizing energy effectively. One of the modules constituting the smart community is an intelligent transportation system, in which various sensors track movements of people and vehicles in real time to optimize migration pathways or means. Social media have the potential to serve as sensors, since people often post transportation information on such media. This paper presents a feasibility study on detecting information, focusing on train status information, by exploiting Twitter as a sensor. We dealt with two issues: (1) for the ambiguity of textual information expressed in tweets, we utilized heuristic rules in text manipulation, and (2) for the differences in the numbers of tweets among train lines, we optimized parameter values in statistical analysis for each train line. The experimental results show that the F-measure of detecting the information was more than 0.85 and the time taken to detect the information was less than 4 minutes. As a result we confirmed the high potential of detecting transportation information through Twitter.