Aspect Based Fine-Grained Sentiment Analysis for Public Policy Opinion Mining

Abstract

AbstractFine-grained mining has substantial practical significance for understanding public opinion toward public policies and optimizing relevant decision-making processes. In this study, an aspect-based sentiment analysis model integrated with both a sentiment lexicon for the policy domain and mutual information (MI) is established from the perspective of attitudinal orientations toward several elements of public policies, including subjects, objects, and tools to analyze comments. First, terms related to the aspects of comments on different policy elements are extracted using the association rules in conjunction with the word2vec algorithm. In addition, the contextual neighbor principle is employed to extract terms that express evaluative opinions and to extricate aspect-based two-tuples from comments. Subsequently, the sentiment lexicon for the policy domain is expanded using the sentiment orientation pointwise mutual information (SO-PMI) algorithm. Four machine learning models (i.e., the support vector machine, logistic regression, naive Bayes, and k-nearest neighbors models) and two deep learning models (i.e., the convolutional neural network (CNN) and long short-term memory models) are compared in terms of their classification performance based on 87,304 comments on public policies crawled from the Weibo platform. The results show that the CNN model integrated with the domain-specific sentiment lexicon and mutual information is effective at facilitating policy element-oriented fine-grained sentiment analysis of public opinion toward policies and therefore has practical decision-making value for the government to better understand the policy demands of the public.KeywordsPublic policySentiment analysisFine-grainedCNNSO-PMI