An Empirical Feasibility Study of Societal Risk Classification Toward BBS Posts

Abstract

Societal risk classification is the fundamental issue for online societal risk monitoring. To show the challenge and feasibility of societal risk classification toward BBS posts, an empirical analysis is implemented in this paper. Through effectiveness analysis, Support Vector Machine based on Bag-Of-Words (BOW-SVM) is adopted for challenge validation, and the distributed document embeddings of BBS posts generated by Paragraph Vector are applied to feasibility study. Based on BOW-SVM, cross-validations of BBS posts labeled by different groups and annotators are conducted. The big fluctuation of cross-validation results indicates the differences of individual risk perceptions, which brings more challenges to societal risk classification. Furthermore, based on the distributed document embeddings of BBS posts, the pairwise similarities of more than 300 thousands BBS posts from different societal risk categories are compared. The higher similarities of BBS posts in the same societal risk category reveal that BBS posts in the same societal risk category share more features than BBS posts in different categories, which manifests the feasibility of societal risk classification of BBS posts, and also reflects the possibility to improve the performance of societal risk monitoring.