Understanding Citizen Issues through Reviews: A Step towards Data Informed Planning in Smart Cities

Abstract

Governments these days are demanding better Smart City technologies in order to connect with citizens and understand their demands. For such governments, much needed information exists on social media where members belonging to diverse groups share different interests, post statuses, review and comment on various topics. Aspect extraction from this data can provide a thorough understanding of citizens’ behaviors and choices. Also, categorization of these aspects can better summarize societal concerns regarding political, economic, religious and social issues. Aspect category detection (ACD) from people reviews is one of the major tasks of aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA). The success of ABSA is mainly defined by the inexpensive and accurate machine-processable representation of the raw input sentences. Previous approaches rely on cumbersome feature extraction procedures from sentences, which adds its own complexity and inaccuracy in performing ACD tasks. In this paper, we propose an inexpensive and simple method to obtain the most suitable representation of a sentence-vector through different algebraic combinations of a sentence’s word vectors, which will act as an input to any machine learning classifier. We have tested our technique on the restaurant review data provided in SemEval-2015 and SemEval-2016. SemEval is a series of global challenges to evaluate the effectiveness of disambiguation of word sense. Our results showed the highest F1-scores of 76.40% in SemEval-2016 Task 5, and 94.99% in SemEval-2015 Task 12.