An Analysis of Public Opinions Regarding Take-Away Food Safety: A 2015–2018 Case Study on Sina Weibo

• Main Authors: Cen Song, Chunyu Guo, Kyle Hunt, Jun Zhuang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-04-01
• Series: Foods
• Subjects: food safety; take-away food; online public opinion; emotional analysis; topic analysis; natural language processing
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2304-8158/9/4/511

Take-away food (also referred to as “take-out” food in different regions of the world) is a very convenient and popular dining choice for millions of people. In this article, we collect online textual data regarding “take-away food safety” from Sina Weibo between 2015 and 2018 using the Octopus Collector. After the posts from Sina Weibo were preprocessed, users’ emotions and opinions were analyzed using natural language processing. To our knowledge, little work has studied public opinions regarding take-away food safety. This paper fills this gap by using latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) and <i>k</i>-means to extract and cluster topics from the posts, allowing for the users’ emotions and related opinions to be mined and analyzed. The results of this research are as follows: (1) data analysis showed that the degree of topics have increased over the years, and there are a variety of topics about take-away food safety; (2) emotional analysis showed that 93.8% of the posts were positive; and (3) topic analysis showed that the topic of public discussion is diverse and rich. Our analysis of public opinion on take-away food safety generates insights for government and industry stakeholders to promote the healthy and vigorous development of the food industry.