Transit Pulse: Utilizing Social Media as a Source for Customer Feedback and Information Extraction with Large Language Model

Users of the transit system flood social networks daily with messages that contain valuable insights crucial for improving service quality. These posts help transit agencies quickly identify emerging issues. Parsing topics and sentiments is key to gaining comprehensive insights to foster service excellence. However, the volume of messages makes manual analysis impractical, and standard NLP techniques like Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) fall short in nuanced interpretation. Traditional sentiment analysis separates topics and sentiments before integrating them, often missing the interaction between them. This incremental approach complicates classification and reduces analytical productivity. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach to extracting and analyzing transit-related information, including sentiment and sarcasm detection, identification of unusual system problems, and location data from social media. Our method employs Large Language Models (LLM), specifically Llama 3, for a streamlined analysis free from pre-established topic labels. To enhance the model's domain-specific knowledge, we utilize Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), integrating external knowledge sources into the information extraction pipeline. We validated our method through extensive experiments comparing its performance with traditional NLP approaches on user tweet data from the real world transit system. Our results demonstrate the potential of LLMs to transform social media data analysis in the public transit domain, providing actionable insights and enhancing transit agencies' responsiveness by extracting a broader range of information.