Grasping Users’ Awareness for Environments from their SNS Posts

Overtourism has a negative impact on tourist sites all over the world. Serious problems are environmental issues, such as littering, caused by the rush of too many visitors. It is important to change people’s mindset to be more environmentally aware for improving this situation. In particular, if we can find people with a high awareness about environments, we can work effectively to promote eco-friendly behavior by taking them as the start. However, grasping individual awareness is inherently difficult. For this challenge, we utilize SNS data, which are available in large volume, with a hypothesis that people’s subconsciousness influences their posts. In this paper, we address two research topics for grasping such awareness. First, we propose a classification task, in which a system is given users’ SNS posts about tourist sites, and classifies them into types of their focuses. Experimental results show widely-used classifiers can solve the task at about 0.84 of accuracy using our created dataset. Second, we investigate the relation of the focuses and such awareness with a questionnaire survey targeting over 2,700 people, and show that users’ awareness influences focuses of SNS posts with both of a statistical analysis and an analysis using real-world data.