A Data-Driven Approach for University Public Opinion Analysis and Its Applications

Abstract

In the era of mobile Internet, college students increasingly tend to express their opinions and views through online social media; furthermore, social media influence the value judgments of college students. Therefore, it is vital to understand and analyze university online public opinion over time. In this paper, we propose a data-driven architecture for analysis of university online public opinion. Weibo, WeChat, Douyin, Zhihu and Toutiao apps are selected as sources for collection of public opinion data. Crawler technology is utilized to automatically obtain user data about target topics to form a database. To avoid the drawbacks of traditional methods, such as sentiment lexicon and machine learning, which rely on a priori knowledge and complex handcrafted features, the Word2Vec tool is used to perform word embedding, the LSTM-CFR model is proposed to realize Chinese word segmentation and a convolutional neural network (CNN) is built to automatically extract implicit features in word vectors, ultimately establishing the nonlinear relationships between implicit features and the sentiment tendency of university public opinion. The experimental results show that the proposed model is more accurate than SVM, RF, NBC and GMM methods, providing valuable information with respect to public opinion management.