Vartalaap

Abstract

Air pollution is a global challenge for cities across the globe. Understanding the public perception of air pollution can help policymakers engage better with the public and appropriately introduce policies. Accurate public perception can also help people to identify the health risks of air pollution and act accordingly. Unfortunately, current techniques for determining perception are not scalable: it involves surveying few hundred people with questionnaire-based surveys. Using the advances in natural language processing (NLP), we propose a more scalable solution called Vartalaap to gauge public perception of air pollution via the microblogging social network Twitter. We curated a dataset of more than 1.2M tweets discussing Delhi-specific air pollution. We find that (unfortunately) the public is supportive of unproven mitigation strategies to reduce pollution, thus risking their health due to a false sense of security. We also find that air quality is a year-long problem, but the discussions are not proportional to the level of pollution and spike up when pollution is more visible. The information required by Vartalaap is publicly available and, as such, it can be immediately applied to study different societal issues across the world.

What Is Polluting Delhi’s Air? A Review from 1990 to 2022

“…The pollution levels are the lowest during the monsoon months, but not negligible. This cyclical nature also overlaps with the overall interest in the topic and efforts to address the issue, peaking at the start of the winter pollution episodes, with the most the media coverage (based on the number of articles published), public interest (based on social media activity and google search trends), and political will (based on the number of political statements made) [12,13].…”

“…After the transport sector, the source with the most media coverage is the open burning of agricultural waste in October and November to prepare fields for the winter crop in the states of Punjab and Haryana [12,13]. Due to time constraints and the lack of an affordable and wide-scale residue management system, farmers consider burning the residue a faster and cheaper way than tilling and inundating the fields to mulch the waste naturally over weeks [98,99].…”

Why communicating air quality information in the simplest form gets more people to understand and get involved in the fight against air pollution

“…In India, an analysis of the print media and the social media reports suggests that the increase in the public complaints 80 on air pollution coincides with the release of open data from the Embassy stations in 2015 in Delhi and Mumbai (Adhikary et al, 2021;Patel et al, 2022). A significant rate of increase in the total number of monitoring stations operating and reporting information in India, also matched this event.…”

Air pollution perception for air quality management: a systematic review exploring research themes and future perspectives

“…They also say that the public response (tweets) is driven by relative PM 2.5 levels experienced by the people rather than absolute values. Another public sentiment study (Adhikary et al 2021) on air pollution mitigation measures found the people's response to be mixed, and those policies were highly criticized. Hswen et al (2019), Sailunaz and Alhajj (2019), Lu et al (2022)used natural language processing techniques to extract and classify sentiment/emotion from the social media posts.…”