Weibo users perception of the COVID-19 pandemic on Chinese social networking service (Weibo): sentiment analysis and fuzzy-c-means model

Background: Over the last decade, social media analysis tools have been used to monitor public sentiment and communication methods for public health emergencies such as the Ebola and Zika epidemics. Research articles have indicated that many outbreaks and pandemics could have been promptly controlled if experts considered social media data. With the World Health Organization (WHO) pandemic statement and various governments government action on the disease, various sentiments regarding coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) have spread across the world. Therefore, sentiment analyses in studying pandemics, such as COVID-19, are important based on recent events. Methods: The Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) method was used to extract keywords from the 850,083 content of Weibo from January 24, 2020, to March 31, 2020. Then the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) was used to perform topic analysis on the keywords. Finally, the fuzzy-c-means method was used to divide the content of Weibo into seven categories of emotions: fear, happiness, disgust, surprise, sadness, anger, and good. And the changes in emotion were tracked over time. Results: The results indicated that people showed “surprise” overall (55.89%);however, with time, the “surprise” decreased. As the knowledge regarding the COVID-19 increased, the “surprise” of the citizens decreased (from 59.95% to 46.58%). Citizens’ feelings of “fear” and “good” increased as the number of deaths associated with COVID-19 increased (“fear”: from 15.42% to 20.95% “good”: 10.31% to 18.89%). As the number of infections was suppressed, the feelings of “fear” and “good” diminished (“fear”: from 20.95% to 15.79% “good”: from 18.89% to 8.46%). Conclusions: The findings of this study indicate that people’s feelings were analyzed regarding the COVID-19 pandemic in three stages over time. In the beginning, people’s emotions were primarily “surprised”;however after the outbreak, people’s “surprise” decreased with increasing knowledge. At the end of the phase, I of the COVID-19 pandemic, people’s “fear” and “good” feelings were diminished as the epidemic was suppressed. People’s interest shifted from China to other countries and their concern about the situation in other countries. © Journal of Medical Artificial Intelligence. All rights reserved.