Estimate of Public Environment-Emotional Index Based on Micro-Blog Data

The purpose of this paper is to estimate an index that can reflect public emotions towards environmental status based on micro-blog data. We first analyze the micro-blog data by emotion classification and sentiment analysis techniques to obtain people's positive/negative emotional level about their surrounding environmental conditions. Afterwards, the correlation between an emotional index and the air quality index (AQI) collected from air monitoring stations is evaluated. Such an emotional index hence can potentially be included in future environmental management solutions, for instance, as feedbacks from the public after certain environment protection policies are conducted or as an extra reference for pollution detection.