Multidimensional mining of public opinion in emergency events

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 545-560
Author(s):  
Qingqing Zhou ◽  
Ming Jing
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Opinion Mining ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Public ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Multiple Dimensions ◽  
Emergency Event ◽  
Comprehensive Information ◽  
Opinion Expression ◽  
Emergency Events

Purpose The suddenness, urgency and social publicity of emergency events lead to great impacts on public life. The deep analysis of emergency events can provide detailed and comprehensive information for the public to get trends of events timely. With the development of social media, users prefer to express opinions on emergency events online. Thus, massive public opinion information of emergencies has been generated. Hence, this paper aims to conduct multidimensional mining on emergency events based on user-generated contents, so as to obtain finer-grained results. Design/methodology/approach This paper conducted public opinion analysis via fine-grained mining. Specifically, public opinion about an emergency event was collected as experimental data. Secondly, opinion mining was conducted to get users’ opinion polarities. Meanwhile, users’ information was analysed to identify impacts of users’ characteristics on public opinion. Findings The experimental results indicate that public opinion is mainly negative in emergencies. Meanwhile, users in developed regions are more active in expressing opinions. In addition, male users, especially male users with high influence, are more rational in public opinion expression. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first research to identify public opinion in emergency events from multiple dimensions, which can get in-detail differences of users’ online expression.

Leveraging cross-media analytics to detect events and mine opinions for emergency management

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 487-506 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wei Xu ◽  
Lingyu Liu ◽  
Wei Shang
Keyword(s):  
Decision Support ◽  
Emergency Management ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Event Detection ◽  
Opinion Mining ◽  
Time Response ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Cross Media ◽  
Emergency Event ◽  
Emergency Events

Purpose Timely detection of emergency events and effective tracking of corresponding public opinions are critical in emergency management. As media are immediate sources of information on emergencies, the purpose of this paper is to propose cross-media analytics to detect and track emergency events and provide decision support for government and emergency management departments. Design/methodology/approach In this paper, a novel emergency event detection and opinion mining method is proposed for emergency management using cross-media analytics. In the proposed approach, an event detection module is constructed to discover emergency events based on cross-media analytics, and after the detected event is confirmed as an emergency event, an opinion mining module is used to analyze public sentiments and then generate public sentiment time series for early warning via a semantic expansion technique. Findings Empirical results indicate that a specific emergency can be detected and that public opinion can be tracked effectively and efficiently using cross-media analytics. In addition, the proposed system can be used for decision support and real-time response for government and emergency management departments. Research limitations/implications This paper takes full advantage of cross-media information and proposes novel emergency event detection and opinion mining methods for emergency management using cross-media analytics. The empirical analysis results illustrate the efficiency of the proposed method. Practical implications The proposed method can be applied for detection of emergency events and tracking of public opinions for emergency decision support and governmental real-time response. Originality/value This research work contributes to the design of a decision support system for emergency event detection and opinion mining. In the proposed approaches, emergency events are detected by leveraging cross-media analytics, and public sentiments are measured using an auto-expansion of the domain dictionary in the field of emergency management to eliminate the misclassification of the general dictionary and to make the quantization more accurate.

scholarly journals Social media and sentiment in bioenergy consultation

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Uren ◽  
Daniel Wright ◽  
James Scott ◽  
Yulan He ◽  
Hassan Saif
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
New Media ◽  
Sentiment Analysis ◽  
Opinion Mining ◽  
Public Consultation ◽  
Short Paper ◽  
Consultation Process ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Uk

Purpose – This paper aims to address the following challenge: the push to widen participation in public consultation suggests social media as an additional mechanism through which to engage the public. Bioenergy companies need to build their capacity to communicate in these new media and to monitor the attitudes of the public and opposition organizations towards energy development projects. Design/methodology/approach – This short paper outlines the planning issues bioenergy developments face and the main methods of communication used in the public consultation process in the UK. The potential role of social media in communication with stakeholders is identified. The capacity of sentiment analysis to mine opinions from social media is summarised and illustrated using a sample of tweets containing the term “bioenergy”. Findings – Social media have the potential to improve information flows between stakeholders and developers. Sentiment analysis is a viable methodology, which bioenergy companies should be using to measure public opinion in the consultation process. Preliminary analysis shows promising results. Research limitations/implications – Analysis is preliminary and based on a small dataset. It is intended only to illustrate the potential of sentiment analysis and not to draw general conclusions about the bioenergy sector. Social implications – Social media have the potential to open access to the consultation process and help bioenergy companies to make use of waste for energy developments. Originality/value – Opinion mining, though established in marketing and political analysis, is not yet systematically applied as a planning consultation tool. This is a missed opportunity.

Back and forth to the campus: Tackling invasions through service-learning activities in higher education

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (7) ◽  
pp. 1413-1427
Author(s):  
María J. Servia ◽  
Anxo Cao ◽  
Yaiza R. Lueje
Keyword(s):  
Service Learning ◽  
Local Population ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Campus Sustainability ◽  
The Public ◽  
Multiple Dimensions ◽  
Open Debate ◽  
Service Activity ◽  
Good Potential ◽  
Real Community

Purpose Invasive species are under the spotlight because of their detrimental effects on biodiversity. However, management of invasions presents multiple dimensions frequently difficult to disentangle. This complex topic has been tackled through a service-learning project on an invasive insect (Vespa velutina), a bee-eating species invading Europe. Specifically, this paper aims to assess the educational needs and motivations detected in a local population for the control of V. velutina, and evaluate the educational achievements of students participating in the project. Design/methodology/approach The paper illustrates how students prepared the service activity, which consisted in a quiz and interviews to public in a honey festival located in an area that has invested heavily in the control of the hornet. They informed visitors on its biology and impacts, and collected information on visitors’ knowledge and attitudes towards the hornet. This information was taken back to the class and discussed in an open debate. Findings The service activity uncovered important knowledge gaps of the local population and revealed the attachment to controversial control methods. Students acknowledged that the project met a real community need and valued the contact with the public, and the presentation of the project in the Faculty favored a debate on invasions management and biodiversity protection under the framework of campus sustainability. Originality/value While students are familiar with actions on campus sustainability, they are seldom confronted with the evaluation of management decisions on complex topics involving multiple dimensions. This service-learning project showed a good potential for fostering in-depth debates and promoting student engagement in campus sustainable initiatives.

scholarly journals The impact of religious values in the Jordanian political discourses on public opinion (field study on universities students)

2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Zaid Odeh Ebniya
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
University Students ◽  
Family Income ◽  
Religious Values ◽  
The Political ◽  
Age Group ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Discourses ◽  
The Impact

Purpose The purpose of this study is to know the effect of religious values that the Jordan Political discipline adopted and were mentioned in the Jordan political discourses (Amman Message 2005, discourse of King Abdullah II in the European Parliament 2008 and his discourse in United Nations 2015) on the public opinion of the university students, especially their attitudes toward terrorism and extremism. Defending Islam is the responsibility of the Jordan political leadership according to Hashemite legacy and promoting Islamic values that rejected terrorism and extremism to Jordanian youth, especially tolerance and moderation values, to counter defamations and claims against Islam and correct its image in the West. Design/methodology/approach A political discourse analysis approach was used by analyzing the Amman Message and identifying the most important religious values contained therein. Also, a quantitative research method was used in this study. The study population consisted of university students, particularly Jordanian University students because being one of the high-bred Jordanian universities, it is characterized with gender, age, regional affiliation and family income diversities. This study depends on a purposive sample containing 350 students (175 males and 175 females). The survey was conducted in the academic year (2018-2019). A questionnaire that was reviewed by three jurors was used in data collection. Findings The results of the analysis of the political discourse showed that the values of tolerance and moderation are among the most valued in the Amman Message, where they were frequently repeated. Also, findings have shown that the religious values adopted by the Jordanian political system mentioned in the political discourses had an impact on public opinion of university students on terrorism and extremism causes in a large percent. When gender differed (males and females), the impact ratio of the public opinion for males was higher than that for females. When the age group differed (18-22 and 23-30 years), the effect ratio with the old age group was higher than the effect ratio for the students with the youngest age group. When regional affiliation differed (Jordanian and Jordanian of Palestinian origin), the impact ratio of the public opinion for Jordanian students was higher than that for Jordanian students of Palestinian origin. When regional family income differed (500 dinars and less, more than 500 dinars), the impact ratio of the public opinion for students with family income more than 500 dinars was higher than that for students with family income 500 dinars and less. Originality/value This study represents an approach to recognize the effect of religious values that were adopted by the Jordanian political system mentioned in the political discourses on public opinion of university students on terrorism and extremism causes, considering that university students represent the influential youth group in the Jordanian society.

The evidence of compelling arguments in agenda building

2014 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hyejoon Rim ◽  
Jin Hong Ha ◽  
Spiro Kiousis
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Public Relations ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Agenda Building ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Public ◽  
Health Authorities ◽  
Information Subsidies

Purpose – This paper aims to explore the links among health authorities’ public relations efforts, news media coverage, and public perceptions of risk during the H1N1 pandemic outbreak. Design/methodology/approach – This study used a triangulation of research methods by comparing public relations materials, media coverage, and public opinion. The data were collected from a federal government web site, national newspapers, and national polls. Findings – The data revealed a positive relationship between information subsidy attention and media attention to the H1N1 disease as well as the severity attribute. The salience of the severity attribute in information subsidies was linked with increased H1N1 salience in media coverage, extending the testing of the compelling-arguments hypothesis to an agenda-building context. However, there was no association between salience of the severity attribute and public risk perceptions. Research limitations/implications – The study provides evidence for public relations effectiveness. However, the limited influence of the severity frame on the public's risk perception suggests a gap between news coverage and the public's view. Framing that effectively empowers the public to engage in desired behavior should be further studied for the success of a public health campaign. The study is limited to examining the severity attribute. A future study should pay more attention to different issue attributes or other frames. The media sample was limited to newspapers and thus lacks generalizability. Originality/value – The study contributes to public relations scholarship by demonstrating how information subsidies influence media agendas and public opinion in a health communication context. The public health authorities’ role in influencing media agenda should be stressed.

scholarly journals Beyond Positive and Negative: New Perspectives on Feedback Effects in Public Opinion on the Welfare State

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marius R Busemeyer ◽  
Aurélien Abrassart ◽  
Roula Nezi
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Public Attitudes ◽  
Dynamic Feedback ◽  
Policy Feedback ◽  
Feedback Effects ◽  
The Public ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Positive And Negative Feedback ◽  
The Welfare State

Abstract The study of policy feedback on public attitudes and policy preferences has become a growing area of research in recent years. Scholars in the tradition of Pierson usually argue that positive, self-reinforcing feedback effects dominate (that is, attitudes are commensurate with existing institutions), whereas the public thermostat model developed by Wlezien and Soroka expects negative, self-undermining feedback. Moving beyond the blunt distinction between positive and negative feedback, this article develops and proposes a more fine-grained typology of feedback effects that distinguishes between accelerating, self-reinforcing and self-undermining, specific and general, as well as long- and short-term dynamic feedback. The authors apply this typology in an analysis of public opinion on government spending in different areas of the welfare state for twenty-one OECD countries, employing a pseudo-panel approach. The empirical analysis confirms the usefulness of this typology since it shows that different types of feedback effects can be observed empirically.

Research on public emotional polarization and public opinion evolution of OTC and learning during the COVID-19 epidemic: taking the topic of OTC on Zhihu as an example

2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Xin Feng ◽  
Xu Wang ◽  
Yue Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Time Series ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Topic Model ◽  
Development Trend ◽  
Intrinsic Structure ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Learning And Teaching ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Government ◽  
Emotional Value

PurposeThe outbreak and continuation of COVID-19 have spawned the transformation of traditional teaching models to a certain extent. The Chinese Ministry of Education’s guidance on “keep learning and teaching during class suspension” has made OTC and learning (OTC) become routinized, and the public’s emotional attitudes toward OTC have also evolved over time. The purpose of this study is to segment the emotional text data and introduce it into the topic model to reveal the evolution process and stage characteristics of public emotional polarity and public opinion of OTC topics during public health emergencies in the context of social media participation. The research has important guiding significance for the development of OTC and can influence and improve the efficiency and effect of OTC to a certain extent. The analysis of online public opinion can provide suggestions for the government and media to guide the trend of public opinion and optimize the OTC model.Design/methodology/approachThis paper takes the topic of “OTC” on Zhihu during the COVID-19 epidemic as an example, combined with the characteristics of public opinion changes, chooses Boson emotional dictionary and time series analysis method to build an OTC network public opinion theme evolution analysis framework that integrates emotional analysis and topic mining. Finally, an empirical analysis of the dynamic evolution of the communication network for each stage of the life cycle of a specific topic is realized.FindingsThis paper draws the following conclusions: (1) Through the emotional value table and the change trend chart of the number of comments, the analysis found that the number of positive comments is greater than the number of negative comments, which can be inferred that the public gradually accepts “OTC” and presents a positive emotional state. (2) By observing the changing trend of the average daily emotional value of the public, it is found that the overall emotional value shows a stable development trend after a large fluctuation. From the actual emotional value and the fitted emotional value curve, it can be seen that the overall curve fit is good, so ARIMA (12, 1, 6) can accurately predict the dynamic trend of the daily average emotional value in this paper. Therefore, based on the above-mentioned public opinion, emotional analysis research, relevant countermeasures and suggestions are put forward, which is conducive to guiding the development direction of public opinion in a positive way.Originality/valueTaking the topic of “OTC” in Zhihu as an example, this paper combines Boson emotional dictionary and time series to conduct a series of research analyses. Boson emotional dictionary can analyze the public’s emotional tendency, and time series can well analyze the intrinsic structure and complex features of the data to predict the future values. The combination of the two research methods allows for an adequate and unique study of public emotional polarization and the evolution of public opinion.

Defining sustainable universities following public opinion formation process

2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 294-306 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deniz Zaptcioglu Celikdemir ◽  
Gonca Gunay ◽  
Alev Katrinli ◽  
Sebnem Penbek Alpbaz
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Regional Development ◽  
Formation Process ◽  
Western Country ◽  
Opinion Formation ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Public ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Sustainable Universities

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to define the sustainable university in Turkey, by considering perspectives of various stakeholders such as experts, intellectual, public, political parties and media using public opinion formation analysis. The paper aims to re-define the “sustainable university” with all dimensions including environmental, economic and social factors in Turkey. Design/methodology/approach In this study, the model of shaping the policy agenda and public opinion formation by certain groups, presented by Papadakis (1996), was used to determine the main characteristics of a sustainable university. Based on this model, the researchers collected data from intellectuals, experts, political parties, media and public simultaneously. Focus groups and archival search were used. Findings The results of the public opinion formation process presented that the definition of sustainable universities in Turkey includes the economic, ecological and social aspects and a holistic view of different groups. The findings of the study presented that the definition of sustainable universities in Turkey has many facets. Different groups in the public opinion formation process share almost similar views, though these points are usually mentioned under different headings. Thus, nearly each respondent in the public opinion formation process discusses the concept of being a “trade mark” as a university. Research limitations/implications The research may lack generalizability, as it takes place in Turkey, which is a non-Western country. Practical implications The research sheds a light for universities, which are the major cornerstones of higher education, especially in the area of sustainability and sustainable development. Also, universities have a great impact in regional development, which stresses once again the importance of sustainability in higher education. They should modify their education programs and curricula in accordance with sustainability. University–industry cooperation should be provided. They should manage to become a trademark. Social implications Universities being the major cornerstones of higher education play a vital role in regional development of countries; therefore, their sustainable development should be well handled to enable regional development. Originality/value The universities are the major actors which should pursue sustainability, as they affect society. The studies on sustainability and universities have been generally grouped under two main subjects in the literature. First group of studies highlights the support of universities for sustainability of corporations, whereas other studies stress the importance of becoming a sustainable university. There are not many studies on this subject which considers the public opinion formation process throughout the literature; therefore, this study contributes to the literature with this aspect. The study takes place in Izmir, Turkey, which is a non-Western country. Most of the studies on this subject take place in Western countries, so as the study is deployed in a non-Western country, it reflects a different point of view.

scholarly journals A Study on the Decision-Making of Effective S/W Education based on Opinion Mining Analysis

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (4.16) ◽  
pp. 5-9
Author(s):  
Ji-Hoon Seo ◽  
Ji-Hoon Seo ◽  
Nam-Hun Park ◽  
Kil-Hong Joo
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Opinion Mining ◽  
Ministry Of Education ◽  
Education Policies ◽  
The Public ◽  
Evaluation Functions ◽  
Effective Policy ◽  
Policy Agendas ◽  
Set Up

The Currently, along with the advent of the web 2.0 era, due to the continuous expansion of social media service infrastructures, the shares of conventional public opinion evaluation functions have been gradually shifting from the existing mass media to social media. This phe-nomenon is attributable to the two-way communication and convenience unique to social media and social media are now in charge of an axis of public opinion evaluation standards. In particular, since diverse interests conflict in education policies and countless conflicts of opinions occur in the process of setting up policy agendas, in establishing education policies, accurately analyzing reputations among the public, who are the targets of education policies, in order to set up effective policy agendas, is the most important issue. Therefore, in this study, the resultant values of huge unstructured data on the positive and negative reputations of past policy agendas related to the mandatory software education that has been organized as a regular curriculum of middle/high schools from 2018 in Korea, which have been addressed by the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning, and the Korea Foundation for the Advancement of Science and Creativity, felt and judged by the general public on social media such as blogs and Twitter and on online media including portal news were visualized through opinion mining analysis techniques to derive more effective software education related policy agendas. In addition, based on the foregoing, a Korean style software education system that fits circumstances was constructed and the system is expected to become an important measure that provides guidelines for setting mid/long-term road maps for the fostering of creative and convergent talented persons equipped with international competitiveness and software education in Korea.  

Relational Features in Fine-Grained Opinion Analysis

2013 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 473-509 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Johansson ◽  
Alessandro Moschitti
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Opinion Mining ◽  
Learning Approaches ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Optimal Analysis ◽  
Opinion Analysis ◽  
Language Discourse ◽  
Opinion Expression ◽  
Efficient Approximation

Fine-grained opinion analysis methods often make use of linguistic features but typically do not take the interaction between opinions into account. This article describes a set of experiments that demonstrate that relational features, mainly derived from dependency-syntactic and semantic role structures, can significantly improve the performance of automatic systems for a number of fine-grained opinion analysis tasks: marking up opinion expressions, finding opinion holders, and determining the polarities of opinion expressions. These features make it possible to model the way opinions expressed in natural-language discourse interact in a sentence over arbitrary distances. The use of relations requires us to consider multiple opinions simultaneously, which makes the search for the optimal analysis intractable. However, a reranker can be used as a sufficiently accurate and efficient approximation. A number of feature sets and machine learning approaches for the rerankers are evaluated. For the task of opinion expression extraction, the best model shows a 10-point absolute improvement in soft recall on the MPQA corpus over a conventional sequence labeler based on local contextual features, while precision decreases only slightly. Significant improvements are also seen for the extended tasks where holders and polarities are considered: 10 and 7 points in recall, respectively. In addition, the systems outperform previously published results for unlabeled (6 F-measure points) and polarity-labeled (10–15 points) opinion expression extraction. Finally, as an extrinsic evaluation, the extracted MPQA-style opinion expressions are used in practical opinion mining tasks. In all scenarios considered, the machine learning features derived from the opinion expressions lead to statistically significant improvements.

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