Analysis of Citizen Perspectives on Traffic Accidents Shared on Social Media Using Large Language Models

Recently, social media discourse has provided transportation researchers with a valuable opportunity to evaluate public sentiment toward road safety across multiple dimensions. In this study, a process for the opinion analysis of accident-related social media messages using large language models is proposed and applied as a case study. In this process, after extraction, the data are preprocessed, and then the Gemma‑4 generative language model is fine-tuned and employed for three tasks: text classification, sentiment analysis, and summarization. In the first step, accident-related messages were classified and separated. In the second step, the fine-tuned language model was able to perform sentiment analysis on accident-related messages with an accuracy of 87%. Finally, thematic summarization of the messages and analysis of the results were conducted. The results of sentiment analysis and thematic summarization showed that although most messages were news oriented, approximately 21% of them contained negative opinions and complaints from users, pointing to various issues including infrastructural road safety challenges as well as certain managerial and cultural aspects. These findings indicate that these messages, in addition to providing information about accidents, reflect citizens’ views, criticisms, and suggestions. They can contribute to a better understanding of road safety and transportation issues, especially at the local level where public surveys are not regularly conducted.