Automatic sentiment analysis of public opinion on nuclear energy

Abstract

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.