Revealing Public Opinion towards the COVID-19 Vaccine with Weibo Data in China: BertFDA-Based Model.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created unprecedented burdens on people's health and subjective well-being. While countries around the world have established models to track and predict the affective states of COVID-19, identifying the topics of public discussion and sentiment evolution of the vaccine, particularly the differences in topics of concern between vaccine-support and vaccine-hesitant groups, remains scarce. Using social media data from the two years following the outbreak of COVID-19 (23 January 2020 to 23 January 2022), coupled with state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) techniques, we developed a public opinion analysis framework (BertFDA). First, using dynamic topic clustering on Weibo through the latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) model, a total of 118 topics were generated in 24 months using 2,211,806 microblog posts. Second, by building an improved Bert pre-training model for sentiment classification, we provide evidence that public negative sentiment continued to decline in the early stages of COVID-19 vaccination. Third, by modeling and analyzing the microblog posts from the vaccine-support group and the vaccine-hesitant group, we discover that the vaccine-support group was more concerned about vaccine effectiveness and the reporting of news, reflecting greater group cohesion, whereas the vaccine-hesitant group was particularly concerned about the spread of coronavirus variants and vaccine side effects. Finally, we deployed different machine learning models to predict public opinion. Moreover, functional data analysis (FDA) is developed to build the functional sentiment curve, which can effectively capture the dynamic changes with the explicit function. This study can aid governments in developing effective interventions and education campaigns to boost vaccination rates.

Analysis of public opinion evolution of COVID-19 based on LDA-ARMA hybrid model.

The aim of this study was to explore a method for developing an emotional evolution classification model for large-scale online public opinion of events such as Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), in order to guide government departments to adopt differentiated forms of emergency management and to correctly guide online public opinion for severely afflicted areas such as Wuhan and those afflicted elsewhere in China. We propose the LDA-ARMA deep neural network for dynamic presentation and fine-grained categorization of a public opinion events. This was applied to a huge quantity of online public opinion texts in a complicated setting and integrated the proposed sentiment measurement algorithm. To begin, the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) was employed to extract information about the topic of comments. The autoregressive moving average model (ARMA) was then utilized to perform multidimensional sentiment analysis and evolution prediction on large-scale textual data related to COVID-19 published by netizens from Wuhan and other countries on Sina Weibo. The results show that Wuhan netizens paid more attention to the development of the situation, treatment measures, and policies related to COVID-19 than other issues, and were under greater emotional pressure, whereas netizens in the rest of the country paid more attention to the overall COVID-19 prevention and control, and were more positive and optimistic with the assistance of the government and NGOs. The average error in predicting public opinion sentiment was less than 5.64%, demonstrating that this approach may be effectively applied to the analysis of large-scale online public sentiment evolution.