Study on the Evolution of Public Opinion on Public Health Events

It is very important to properly handle public emergencies, such as accident disasters, public health events and social security events, and understanding public opinion on public emergencies and its evolution is necessary to deal with the public emergencies. In this paper, we focus on nine public health events related to COVID-19, and explore the evolution of public opinion on these events. Specifically, we first collect information of public opinion on an event from Sina Weibo, including posts, comments. Based on the collected data, commenting networks are constructed. After that, we design a method to explore the evolution of public opinion on these events by observing and analyzing the evolution of commenting networks, including the changes in the number, emotions and topics of the comments. Further, we analyze the influence of emotion on the number and the topics of the comments. Finally, we obtain some observations that can help the emergency management departments understand the evolution of public opinion on public health events, and developing emergency plans to guide and control it.