Exploring climate change discourse on social media and blogs using a topic modeling analysis

Abstract

Climate change is one of the most pressing global issues of our time, and understanding public perception and awareness of the topic is crucial for developing effective policies to mitigate its effects. While traditional survey methods have been used to gauge public opinion, advances in natural language processing (NLP) and data visualization techniques offer new opportunities to analyze user-generated content from social media and blog posts. In this study, a new dataset of climate change-related texts was collected from social media sources and various blogs. The dataset was analyzed using BERTopic and LDA to identify and visualize the most important topics related to climate change. The study also used sentence similarity to determine the similarities in the comments written and which topic categories they belonged to. The performance of different techniques for keyword extraction and text representation, including OpenAI, Maximal Marginal Relevance (MMR), and KeyBERT, was compared for topic modeling with BERTopic. It was seen that the best coherence score and topic diversity metric were obtained with OpenAI-based BERTopic. The results provide insights into the public's attitudes and perceptions towards climate change, which can inform policy development and contribute to efforts to reduce activities that cause climate change.