Detecting Public Perceptions of Apollo Go on Chinese Social Media Based on Topic Modeling and Sentiment analysis

As one representative of autonomous vehicles (AVs), Apollo Go, Baidu's self-driving cab service, has been operated in 11 cities in China and aroused heated discussion on Chinese social media after its crash with one pedestrian in Wuhan in July, 2024. It's significant to explore the public's opinions and sentiment for a company to promote its products and expand its market. Chinese social media, Weibo, provides a vast amount of data to dig out the public attitudes and perspectives. In this paper, 11,882 Weibo posts from May 29th to August 15th 2024 were crawled for topic modelling and sentiment analysis by using LDA algorithm and sentiment dictionaries. It is found that the public mainly focus on five topics related with Apollo Go, including unemployment, accident and privacy, rumor response and market expansion, industry development and riding experience as well as price. While some people embrace Apollo Go which, they think, stands for the future means of transportation, some of them show their concern about the liability for the accident, riding safety, possible privacy invasion as well as the potential unemployment. At the end this study, several measures are put forward to tackle those negative sentiments to promote the popularity of AVs. Meanwhile, the limitation of this study were also proposed at the conclusion of this paper.