Leveraging Personal Navigation Assistant Systems Using Automated Social Media Traffic Reporting

Modern urbanization is demanding smarter technologies to improve a variety of applications in intelligent transportation systems to relieve the increasing amount of vehicular traffic congestion and incidents. Existing incident detection techniques are limited to the use of sensors in the transportation network and hang on human-inputs. Despite of its data abundance, social media is not well-exploited in such context. In this paper, we develop an automated traffic alert system based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) that filters this flood of information and extract important traffic-related bullets. To this end, we employ the fine-tuning Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) language embedding model to filter the related traffic information from social media. Then, we apply a question-answering model to extract necessary information characterizing the report event such as its exact location, occurrence time, and nature of the events. We demonstrate the adopted NLP approaches outperform other existing approach and, after effectively training them, we focus on real-world situation and show how the developed approach can, in real-time, extract traffic-related information and automatically convert them into alerts for navigation assistance applications such as navigation apps.Comment: This paper is accepted for publication in IEEE Technology Engineering Management Society International Conference (TEMSCON'20), Metro Detroit, Michigan (USA

Detection of traffic events from Finnish social media data

Social media has gained significant popularity and importance during the past few years and has become an essential part of many people s everyday lives. As social media users write about a broad range of topics, popular social networking sites can serve as a perfect base for various data mining and information extraction applications. One possibility among these could be the real-time detection of unexpected traffic events or anomalies, which could be used to help traffic managers to discover and mitigate problematic spots in a timely manner or to assist passengers with making informed decisions about their travel route. The purpose of this study is to develop a Finnish traffic information system that relies on social media data. The potential of using social network streams in traffic information extraction has been demonstrated in several big cities, but no study has so far investigated the possible use in smaller communities such as towns in Finland. The complexity of Finnish language also poses further challenges. The aim of the research is to investigate what methods would be the most suitable to analyse and extract information from Finnish social media messages and to incorporate these into the implementation of a practical application. In order to determine the most effective methods for the purposes of this study, an extensive literature research was performed in the fields of social media mining and textual and linguistic analysis with a special focus on frameworks and methods designed for Finnish language. In addition, a website and a mobile application were developed for data collection, analysis and demonstration. The implemented traffic event detection system is able to detect and classify incidents from the public Twitter stream. Tests of the analysis methods have determined high accuracy both in terms of textual and cluster analysis. Although certain limitations and possible improvements should be considered in the future, the ready traffic information system has already demonstrated satisfactory performance and lay the foundation for further studies and research

Detection of traffic events from Finnish social media data

Social media has gained significant popularity and importance during the past few years and has become an essential part of many people s everyday lives. As social media users write about a broad range of topics, popular social networking sites can serve as a perfect base for various data mining and information extraction applications. One possibility among these could be the real-time detection of unexpected traffic events or anomalies, which could be used to help traffic managers to discover and mitigate problematic spots in a timely manner or to assist passengers with making informed decisions about their travel route. The purpose of this study is to develop a Finnish traffic information system that relies on social media data. The potential of using social network streams in traffic information extraction has been demonstrated in several big cities, but no study has so far investigated the possible use in smaller communities such as towns in Finland. The complexity of Finnish language also poses further challenges. The aim of the research is to investigate what methods would be the most suitable to analyse and extract information from Finnish social media messages and to incorporate these into the implementation of a practical application. In order to determine the most effective methods for the purposes of this study, an extensive literature research was performed in the fields of social media mining and textual and linguistic analysis with a special focus on frameworks and methods designed for Finnish language. In addition, a website and a mobile application were developed for data collection, analysis and demonstration. The implemented traffic event detection system is able to detect and classify incidents from the public Twitter stream. Tests of the analysis methods have determined high accuracy both in terms of textual and cluster analysis. Although certain limitations and possible improvements should be considered in the future, the ready traffic information system has already demonstrated satisfactory performance and lay the foundation for further studies and research

Traffic event detection framework using social media

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by IEEE in 2017 IEEE International Conference on Smart Grid and Smart Cities (ICSGSC) on 18/09/2017, available online: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8038595 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.© 2017 IEEE. Traffic incidents are one of the leading causes of non-recurrent traffic congestions. By detecting these incidents on time, traffic management agencies can activate strategies to ease congestion and travelers can plan their trip by taking into consideration these factors. In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in Twitter because of the real-time nature of its data. Twitter has been used as a way of predicting revenues, accidents, natural disasters, and traffic. This paper proposes a framework for the real-time detection of traffic events using Twitter data. The methodology consists of a text classification algorithm to identify traffic related tweets. These traffic messages are then geolocated and further classified into positive, negative, or neutral class using sentiment analysis. In addition, stress and relaxation strength detection is performed, with the purpose of further analyzing user emotions within the tweet. Future work will be carried out to implement the proposed framework in the West Midlands area, United Kingdom.Published versio

Incident detection using data from social media

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by IEEE in 2017 IEEE 20th International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC) on 15/03/2018, available online: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8317967/citations#citations The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.© 2017 IEEE. Due to the rapid growth of population in the last 20 years, an increased number of instances of heavy recurrent traffic congestion has been observed in cities around the world. This rise in traffic has led to greater numbers of traffic incidents and subsequent growth of non-recurrent congestion. Existing incident detection techniques are limited to the use of sensors in the transportation network. In this paper, we analyze the potential of Twitter for supporting real-time incident detection in the United Kingdom (UK). We present a methodology for retrieving, processing, and classifying public tweets by combining Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques with a Support Vector Machine algorithm (SVM) for text classification. Our approach can detect traffic related tweets with an accuracy of 88.27%.Published versio