AUTHOR=Xin Yu , Tan Xiaoshuang , Ren Xiaohui 

TITLE=Will the Relaxation of COVID-19 Control Measures Have an Impact on the Chinese Internet-Using Public? Social Media-Based Topic and Sentiment Analysis

JOURNAL=International Journal of Public Health

VOLUME=Volume 68 - 2023

YEAR=2023

URL=https://www.ssph-journal.org/journals/international-journal-of-public-health/articles/10.3389/ijph.2023.1606074

DOI=10.3389/ijph.2023.1606074

ISSN=1661-8564

ABSTRACT=Background: Since December 2022, the Chinese government announced the further optimization of the implementation of the prevention and control measures of the COVID-19. Methods: We used a user-simulation-like web crawler to collect raw data from Sina-Weibo, and then, processed the raw data. After above process, this study analyzed the data in two aspects. Firstly, we used the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model to analyze the text data and extract the theme. After that sentiment analysis to reveal the sentiment trend and the geographical spatial sentiment distribution.Results: A total of five topics were extracted according to the LDA model, namely, Complete liberalization, Resource supply, Symptom, Knowledge, and Emotional Outlet . Moreover, sentiment analysis further reveals that although the positive and negative percentages differ over time, the overall number of positive microblogs is higher than the number of negative ones. At the same time, the spatial distribution of internet-using public  sentiment varies greatly in different regions and may affect by many factors.Conclusion: Facing the opening-up of COVID-19, although people are worried about deregulation of COVID-19 control, they encourage and help each other.