Scientific journal paper
From text to insight: A natural language processing framework for analysing community perceptions for urban climate resilience
Beatriz Paulino (Paulino, B.); Stefania Stellacci (Stellacci, S.); Pedro Mariano (Mariano, P.); Catarina Ferreira da Silva (Ferreira da Silva, C.);
Journal Title
Urban Climate
Year (definitive publication)
2026
Language
English
Country
United States of America
More Information
Web of Science®

This publication is not indexed in Web of Science®

Scopus

This publication is not indexed in Scopus

Google Scholar

Times Cited: 0

(Last checked: 2026-09-15 14:51)

View record in Google Scholar

This publication is not indexed in Overton

Abstract
Urban resilience strategies should reflect and strengthen community perceptions of environmental and climate risks. However, policymakers often struggle to engage diverse groups and incorporate insights from multiple and informal sources into resilience plans. This study presents a data-driven framework using Natural Language Processing to analyse community narratives regarding local risks and urban governance. By combining complementary analytical and visualisation techniques, we identify public concerns and perceptions and translate them into actionable urban resilience strategies. This approach is applied to a publicly owned neighbourhood in Lisbon facing aging infrastructure, limited access to services, energy poverty, and high unemployment. Primary data were collected from web-scraped sources and focus groups involving public authorities, local associations, and elderly inhabitants. Unsupervised topic modelling (BERTopic) was employed to identify key themes in digital narratives, including infrastructure quality, environmental conditions, and relations with local social institutions. Focus group transcripts were analysed through sentiment analysis, combining lexicon-based (VADER) and transformer-based (BART) models with expert validation and comparative assessment. Results show low levels of community awareness of environmental and climate risks and significant divergences between institutional and community perceptions of priorities, highlighting gaps in communication, institutional trust, and the perceived effectiveness of municipal renewal initiatives. In response, we propose soft co-design climate actions and targeted community awareness campaigns to strengthen risk perceptions and adaptive capacity. This framework offers transferable lessons for urban climate resilience by integrating insights from both digital and physical communities that are often underrepresented in formal decision-making, thereby supporting more inclusive local adaptation planning.
Acknowledgements
--
Keywords
Natural language processing,Community disaster preparedness,Risk perceptions,Vulnerable groups,Climate-related risk analysis,Integrated analysis
  • Computer and Information Sciences - Natural Sciences
  • Earth and related Environmental Sciences - Natural Sciences
  • Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering - Engineering and Technology
Funding Records
Funding Reference Funding Entity
101147113 Comissão Europeia
UID/04466/2025 Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)

With the objective to increase the research activity directed towards the achievement of the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, the possibility of associating scientific publications with the Sustainable Development Goals is now available in Ciência_Iscte. These are the Sustainable Development Goals identified by the author(s) for this publication. For more detailed information on the Sustainable Development Goals, click here.