Automatic sentiment analysis of public opinion on nuclear energy

Hong Xu; Tao Tang; Baorui Zhang; Yuechan Liu

doi:10.1515/kern-2021-0034

Article

Automatic sentiment analysis of public opinion on nuclear energy

Hong Xu , Tao Tang , Baorui Zhang and Yuechan Liu

Published/Copyright: January 13, 2022

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From the journal Kerntechnik Volume 87 Issue 2

Abstract

Opinion mining and sentiment analysis based on social media has been developed these years, especially with the popularity of social media and the development of machine learning. But in the community of nuclear engineering and technology, sentiment analysis is seldom studied, let alone the automatic analysis by using machine learning algorithms. This work concentrates on the public sentiment mining of nuclear energy in German-speaking countries based on the public comments of nuclear news in social media by using the automatic methodology, since compared with the news itself, the comments are closer to the public real opinions. The results showed that majority comments kept in neutral sentiment. 23% of comments were in positive tones, which were approximate 4 times those in negative tones. The concerning issues of the public are the innovative technology development, safety, nuclear waste, accidents and the cost of nuclear power. Decision tree, random forest and long short-term memory networks (LSTM) are adopted for the automatic sentiment analysis. The results show that all of the proposed methods can be applied in practice to some extent. But as a deep learning algorithm, LSTM gets the highest accuracy approximately 85.6% with also the best robustness of all.

Keywords: decision tree (DT); long short-term memory (LSTM); nuclear energy; public acceptability; random forest (RF); sentiment analysis

Corresponding author: Hong Xu, Energy technology R&D division, Jinyuyun Energy Technology Co., Ltd., Chongqing, China, E-mail: xuhong2005@tsinghua.org.cn

Author contributions: All the authors have accepted responsibility for the entire content of this submitted manuscript and approved submission.
Research funding: None declared.
Conflict of interest statement: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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Received: 2021-05-09

Published Online: 2022-01-13

Published in Print: 2022-04-26

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/kern-2021-0034

Keywords for this article

decision tree (DT); long short-term memory (LSTM); nuclear energy; public acceptability; random forest (RF); sentiment analysis