Yue-Chun Lin, Hui-Yi Nie,Ya-Jun Li, Yi-Bo Wu

Internet public opinion monitoring in public health emergencies may benefit from artificial intelligence

Yue-Chun Lin1, Hui-Yi Nie1,Ya-Jun Li2, 3, Yi-Bo Wu3, 4 *

1Nanshan School, Guangzhou Medical University, Guangzhou 511400, China.2Faculty of Humanity Management, Shaanxi University of Chinese Medicine, Shaanxi 712046, China.3Key Research Base of Philosophy and Social Sciences in Shaanxi Province, Health Culture Research Center of Shaanxi, Xi’an 712046, China.4Peking University School of Public Health, Beijing 100191, China.

Internet public opinion is a summary of all kinds of emotions, attitudes and comments conveying and spreading via the internet. How to guide internet public opinion in times of public health emergencies more efficiently and more effectively has become an urgent issue to be solved. Artificial intelligence helps to monitor the internet public opinion in real time, report automatically, provide personalized guidance, make intelligent predictions and issue early warnings. Artificial intelligence technology completes its missions by building platform frameworks, innovating new types of models and simulating human subjective consciousness and behavior with the aid of big data and integration of machine learning. We believe that using Artificial intelligence technology can effectively enhance guidance, influence and credibility throughout internet.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), Public Health, Emergencies, Public Opinion)

Internet public opinion is a summary of all kinds of emotions, attitudes and comments conveying and spreading via the internet, to some extent, controlling the overall path of social opinion [1]. Compared with the traditional media era, the environment of public opinion has changed fundamentally nowadays. It has become increasingly difficult to guide the public opinion due to factors such as the growing body of multimedia and the frequent occurrence of the public health emergencies. How to guide internet public opinion in times of public health emergencies more efficiently and more effectively has become an urgent issue to be solved.

The internet has helped create a ubiquitous “5A” environment, that is, “Anyone” can spread “Any message” such as audio, texts and images via “Any media” at “Anytime” and “Anywhere” [2]. Therefore, there is a need for a technology that helps monitor the internet public opinion in real time, report automatically, provide personalized guidance, make intelligent predictions and issue early warnings [3]. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a type of technology that completes its missions by building platform frameworks, innovating new types of models and simulating human subjective consciousness and behavior with the aid of big data and integration of machine learning. Thus, it can be used as a powerful support for the guidance of the internet public opinion in public health emergencies.

In terms of internet public opinion monitoring, a particular type of automated routine, known as the Web Crawler [4], makes requests to websites to extract data and crawl information out of various media platforms 24/7. It does both gathering and digging of structured and unstructured data including texts, images, audio and so on. Public opinion manager can supervise internet public opinion in real time and find hot spot issues through all channels with the AI technology to process and analyze these big data.

As for automatic reports, news-bot based on engineering coding and news template has a natural dominance in contents like massive templated bulletin and event class news videos. Due to the strength of AI reporting, we can describe, analyze, and explore hot spot issues faster than ever and announce public health emergencies in time. Therefore, we can do our best to meet the rigid needs of society receiving information and diminishing insecurities. On top of this, news-bots’ second-level drafting speed and mass output rate can ensure that main stream media gains advantage in the internet, thereby playing an important role in guiding the public emotions.

AI mediated personalized guidance is a way to predict what the person might be interested in and recommend that through proper channel on the basis of the person’s own preferences. Intelligent and personalized recommendations during public health emergencies can carry out knowledge popularization and targeted rumor refutation, thus promoting the effect of public opinion guidance. At the same time, users can express their own attitudes and perspectives by joining the discussions, and their opinions can later on be used as more reference to provide more intelligent and personalized recommendations, resulting in an even better public opinion guidance [5].

In the aspect of internet public opinion predictions and issuing early warnings, AI technology can do deep learning on previous public opinion in previous representative public health emergencies and build early warning system based on them. When AI technology monitors and captures data about a public health emergency, it can automatically recognize the characteristic of the incident, evaluate risk level on the basis of the early warning system, and predict the probability of occurrence and timing to make early warning system truly intelligent [6]. After the severe acute respiratory syndrome epidemic in 2003, our country has been working on building an emergency management system that dedicated to forming a classified early warning system and a database of internet public opinion predictions in public health emergencies [7]. Scientific and intelligent indication early warning system can help the internet public opinion predictions to be more exact, cut down unwanted incidents like false alarm, delayed alarm or even no alarm, which will help relevant departments to control public opinion crisis, transform passivity into initiative, and lower risks and losses.

In conclusion, we believe that using AI technology in internet public opinion monitoring, news producing, and intelligent early warning system can effectively enhance guidance, influence and credibility throughout internet public opinion management. It is of great importance to promote a new method to guide internet public opinion in public health emergencies under the new situation.

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Corresponding to:Yi-Bo Wu. Peking University School of Public Health, 38 Xueyuan Road, Haidian District, Beijing 100191, China. E-mail: bjmuwuyibo@outlook.com.

This study was supported by the Scientific Research Project of Shaanxi Provincial Education Department in 2021 - Key Research Base Project of Philosophy and Social Sciences.

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AI, artificial intelligence.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Lin YC, Nie HY, Li YL, Wu YB. Internet public opinion monitoring in public health emergencies may benefit from artificial intelligence.. 2021;4(3):13. doi: 10.12032/MDM2021063009.

:Shan-Shan Lin.

:06 May 2021,

18 June 2021,

: 22 June 2021

? 2021 By Authors. Published by TMR Publishing Group Limited. This is an open access article under the CC-BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/BY/4.0/).