Deep Learning-Driven Public Opinion Analysis on the Weibo Topic about AI Art

Abstract

The emergence of AI Art has ignited extensive debates on social media platforms. Various online communities have expressed their opinions on different facets of AI Art and participated in discussions with other users, leading to the generation of a substantial volume of data. Analyzing these data can provide useful insights into the public’s opinions on AI Art, enable the investigation of the origins of conflicts in online debates, and contribute to the sustainable development of AI Art. This paper presents a deep learning-driven framework for analyzing the characteristics of public opinion on the Weibo topic of AI Art. To classify the sentiments users expressed in Weibo posts, the linguistic feature-enhanced pre-training model (LERT) was employed to improve text representation via the fusion of syntactic features, followed by a bidirectional Simple Recurrent Unit (SRU) embedded with a soft attention module (BiSRU++) for capturing the long-range dependencies in text features, thus improving the sentiment classification performance. Furthermore, a text clustering analysis was performed across sentiments to capture the nuanced opinions expressed by Weibo users, hence providing useful insights about different online communities. The results indicate that the proposed sentiment analysis model outperforms common baseline models in terms of classification metrics and time efficiency, and the clustering analysis has provided valuable insights for in-depth analyses of AI Art.