Exploring acceptance of autonomous vehicle policies using KeyBERT and
  SNA: Targeting engineering students
Jinwoo Ha Dongsoo Kim
This study aims to explore user acceptance of Autonomous Vehicle (AV)
policies with improved text-mining methods. Recently, South Korean policymakers
have viewed Autonomous Driving Car (ADC) and Autonomous Driving Robot (ADR) as
next-generation means of transportation that will reduce the cost of
transporting passengers and goods. They support the construction of V2I and V2V
communication infrastructures for ADC and recognize that ADR is equivalent to
pedestrians to promote its deployment into sidewalks. To fill the gap where
end-user acceptance of these policies is not well considered, this study
applied two text-mining methods to the comments of graduate students in the
fields of Industrial, Mechanical, and Electronics-Electrical-Computer. One is
the Co-occurrence Network Analysis (CNA) based on TF-IWF and Dice coefficient,
and the other is the Contextual Semantic Network Analysis (C-SNA) based on both
KeyBERT, which extracts keywords that contextually represent the comments, and
double cosine similarity. The reason for comparing these approaches is to
balance interest not only in the implications for the AV policies but also in
the need to apply quality text mining to this research domain. Significantly,
the limitation of frequency-based text mining, which does not reflect textual
context, and the trade-off of adjusting thresholds in Semantic Network Analysis
(SNA) were considered. As the results of comparing the two approaches, the
C-SNA provided the information necessary to understand users' voices using
fewer nodes and features than the CNA. The users who pre-emptively understood
the AV policies based on their engineering literacy and the given texts
revealed potential risks of the AV accident policies. This study adds
suggestions to manage these risks to support the successful deployment of AVs
on public roads.