Park, Keunhyun; Devisscher, Tahia; Chen, Jade; Zhang, Daniella; Chen, Mingze; Kahanal, Asim
2026-09-09
Link to ScienceDirect
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1618866726004188Measuring how different urban parks support social interaction across a city remains constrained by data limitations and the high cost of traditional surveys and observations. Urban parks are essential settings for social interaction and community life, yet their social benefits vary widely within cities and are unevenly distributed across neighbourhoods. This study introduces a transformer-based classification approach to measure social experience across diverse urban parks, analyzing Google Reviews from 154 urban parks in Vancouver, Canada. We fine-tuned RoBERTa transformer models to classify social interaction content within 49,563 reviews, deriving three park-level indicators: volume of reported social experience, affective tone, and overall satisfaction. This supervised approach advances beyond general sentiment analysis by isolating social dimensions within user-generated content.