{"title":"Analyzing public opinion on COVID-19 through different perspectives and stages.","authors":"Yuqi Gao, Hang Hua, Jiebo Luo","doi":"10.1017/ATSIP.2021.5","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In recent months, COVID-19 has become a global pandemic and had a huge impact on the world. People under different conditions have very different attitudes toward the epidemic. Due to the real-time and large-scale nature of social media, we can continuously obtain a massive amount of public opinion information related to the epidemic from social media. In particular, researchers may ask questions such as \"how is the public reacting to COVID-19 in China during different stages of the pandemic?\", \"what factors affect the public opinion orientation in China?\", and so on. To answer such questions, we analyze the pandemic-related public opinion information on Weibo, China's largest social media platform. Specifically, we have first collected a large amount of COVID-19-related public opinion microblogs. We then use a sentiment classifier to recognize and analyze different groups of users' opinions. In the collected sentiment-orientated microblogs, we try to track the public opinion through different stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, we analyze more key factors that might have an impact on the public opinion of COVID-19 (e.g. users in different provinces or users with different education levels). Empirical results show that the public opinions vary along with the key factors of COVID-19. Furthermore, we analyze the public attitudes on different public-concerning topics, such as staying at home and quarantine. In summary, we uncover interesting patterns of users and events as an insight into the world through the lens of a major crisis.</p>","PeriodicalId":44812,"journal":{"name":"APSIPA Transactions on Signal and Information Processing","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.2000,"publicationDate":"2021-03-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8082129/pdf/","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"APSIPA Transactions on Signal and Information Processing","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1017/ATSIP.2021.5","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2021/1/1 0:00:00","PubModel":"eCollection","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"Computer Science","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
In recent months, COVID-19 has become a global pandemic and had a huge impact on the world. People under different conditions have very different attitudes toward the epidemic. Due to the real-time and large-scale nature of social media, we can continuously obtain a massive amount of public opinion information related to the epidemic from social media. In particular, researchers may ask questions such as "how is the public reacting to COVID-19 in China during different stages of the pandemic?", "what factors affect the public opinion orientation in China?", and so on. To answer such questions, we analyze the pandemic-related public opinion information on Weibo, China's largest social media platform. Specifically, we have first collected a large amount of COVID-19-related public opinion microblogs. We then use a sentiment classifier to recognize and analyze different groups of users' opinions. In the collected sentiment-orientated microblogs, we try to track the public opinion through different stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, we analyze more key factors that might have an impact on the public opinion of COVID-19 (e.g. users in different provinces or users with different education levels). Empirical results show that the public opinions vary along with the key factors of COVID-19. Furthermore, we analyze the public attitudes on different public-concerning topics, such as staying at home and quarantine. In summary, we uncover interesting patterns of users and events as an insight into the world through the lens of a major crisis.