Topics and trends of the on-line public concerns based on Tianya forum

Many social events spread fast through the Internet and arouse wide community discussions. Those on-line public opinions emerge into diverse topics along the time. Moreover, the strength of the topics is fluctuating. How to catch both primary topics and trend of topics over the shifting on-line discussions are not only of theoretical importance for scientific research, but also of practical importance for societal management especially in current China. To try the cutting-edge text analytic technologies to deal with unstructured on-line public opinions and provide support for social problem-solving in the big data era is worth an endeavour. This paper applies dynamic topic model (DTM) to explore the changing topics of new posts collected from Tianya Zatan Board of Tianya Club, the most influential Chinese BBS in mainland China. By analysis of the hot and cold terms trends, we catch the topics shift of main on-line concerns with illustrations of topics of school bus and environment in December of 2011. An algorithm is proposed to compute the strength fluctuation of each topic. With visualized analysis of the respective main topics in several months of 2012, some patterns of the topics fluctuation on the board are summarized.