ST-ETM: A Spatial-Temporal Emergency Topic Model for Public Opinion Identifying in Social Networks

With the development and popularization of social networks, many users and authoritative media broach and share topics through social networks every day. This type of sharing is widespread and is sometimes the first communication of topics of public discussion. Therefore, research on identifying public opinion topics on social networks is of great significance. However, social network posts are short, sparse and noisy, which creates challenges for this research. To overcome these challenges, we propose a spatial-temporal emergency topic model (ST-ETM) to identify public opinion topics in social networks. By introducing spatial-temporal features into the topic model to construct spatial-temporal regions for focusing on topics, the ST-ETM can alleviate the sparsity problem of context in social networks and succeed in focusing on public opinion topics. Moreover, to automatically identify public opinion topics, we introduce the burstiness of the words as a priori in the model, and binary switch variables are combined to automatically identify public opinion topics in social networks. Based on a real Sina Weibo dataset, several comparative experiments are designed to evaluate the performance of our ST-ETM. The experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed ST-ETM method.