Detecting public sentiment over PM2.5 pollution hazards through analysis of Chinese microblog

Decision-making in crisis management can benefit from routine monitoring of the (social) media to discover the mass opinion on highly sensitive crisis events. We present an experiment that analyzes Chinese microblog data (extracted from Weibo.cn) to measure sentiment strength and its change in relation to the recent PM 2.5 air pollution events. The data were analyzed using SentiStrength algorithm together with a special sentiment words dictionary tailored and refined for Chinese language. The results of time series analysis on detected sentiment strength showed that less than one percent of the posts are strong-positive or strong negative. Weekly sentiment strength measures show symmetric changes in positive and negative strength, but overall trend moved towards more positive opinions. Special attention was given to sharp bursts of sentiment strength that coincide temporally with the occurrence of extreme social events. These findings suggest that sentiment strength analysis may generate useful alert and awareness of pending extreme social events.