Smart City Insights from Social Media: A System for Analyzing Citizen Feedback in the Aegean Region

Feriştah Dalkılıç; Enis Karaarslan

doi:10.61969/jai.1883089

Smart City Insights from Social Media: A System for Analyzing Citizen Feedback in the Aegean Region

Abstract

Social media platforms have long acted as sensors for monitoring the city's pulse and citizen satisfaction. Our initial studies have shown that machine learning classifiers can identify citizen issues, but turning these algorithms into a working decision-support system requires a solid framework. This work outlines the complete lifecycle of a scalable web portal designed to collect, store, and analyze Twitter data from Türkiye's Aegean Region. We explain the high-performance computing setup, the linguistic analysis of Turkish social media posts, and the launch of a public interface for real-time visualization. This paper also examines the major changes in social media research following the shift from Twitter to X. We discuss the reliability of our findings in light of the end of the free Academic Research API, highlighting how these new financial pressures create significant challenges for similar future studies. The details of the system developed in our project using open-source tools have already been documented. This work not only provides a guide to technical setup but also highlights the growing value of archived regional datasets during a period of limited data access. The results show that, despite these changing challenges, using natural language processing (NLP) and big data architecture remains essential for local administrators.

Keywords

Supporting Institution

Muğla Sıtkı Koçman University

Project Number

16/160

Ethical Statement

The authors acknowledge the use of Generative AI tools for linguistic refinement and grammatical checking during the preparation of this manuscript. The scientific content, concepts, and data analysis remain the sole work of the authors.

Thanks

This work is supported by the Scientific Research Project Fund of Muğla Sıtkı Koçman University under the project number 16/160.

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Details

Primary Language

English

Subjects

Natural Language Processing

Journal Section

Research Article

Authors

Feriştah Dalkılıç
0000-0001-7528-5110
Türkiye

Enis Karaarslan ^*
0000-0002-3595-8783
Türkiye

Publication Date

April 17, 2026

Submission Date

February 5, 2026

Acceptance Date

April 16, 2026

Published in Issue

Year 2026 Number: 10

DOI

https://doi.org/10.61969/jai.1883089

IZ

https://izlik.org/JA37RE36PC

Cite

RIS / Bibtex

APA

Dalkılıç, F., & Karaarslan, E. (2026). Smart City Insights from Social Media: A System for Analyzing Citizen Feedback in the Aegean Region. Journal of AI, 10, 70-84. https://doi.org/10.61969/jai.1883089