Abstract
The transportation sector is a major contributor to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and is a driver of adverse health effects globally. Increasingly, government policies have promoted the adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) as a solution to mitigate GHG emissions. However, government analysts have failed to fully utilize consumer data in decisions related to charging infrastructure. This is because a large share of EV data is unstructured text, which presents challenges for data discovery. In this article, we deploy advances in transformer-based deep learning to discover topics of attention in a nationally representative sample of user reviews. We report classification accuracies greater than 91% (F1 scores of 0.83), outperforming previously leading algorithms in this domain. We describe applications of these deep learning models for public policy analysis and large-scale implementation. This capability can boost intelligence for the EV charging market, which is expected to grow to US$27.6 billion by 2027.
Consumer data on EV charging behavior are unstructured and remain largely dormant
We provide proof of concept for automated topic classification with transformer models
We achieve 91% accuracy (F1 0.83), outperforming previously leading algorithms
Applications for local and regional policy analysis of EV behavior are described
Transformer neural networks have emerged as the preeminent models for natural language processing, seeing production-level use with Google search and translation algorithms. These models have had a major impact on context learning from text in many fields, e.g., health care, finance, manufacturing; however, there have been no empirical advances to date in electric mobility.
Given the digital transformations in energy and transportation, there are growing opportunities for real-time analysis of critical energy infrastructure. A large, untapped source of EV mobility data is unstructured text generated by mobile app users reviewing charging stations. Using transformer-based deep learning, we present multilabel classification of charging station reviews with performance exceeding human experts in some cases. This paves the way for automatic discovery and real-time tracking of EV user experiences, which can inform local and regional policies to address climate change.
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