Understanding the early formation of attitudes towards emerging technologies, such as quantum science & technology (QS&T), is essential for aligning the effect of science communication in...Show moreUnderstanding the early formation of attitudes towards emerging technologies, such as quantum science & technology (QS&T), is essential for aligning the effect of science communication in practice with its intentions. This study explores the application of natural language processing (NLP) techniques to investigate the influence of news articles on social media comments regarding QS&T. We curated a dataset of 217 articles and 14, 391 top-level comments from Reddit. Employing GPT-4, a semi-automated annotation method was developed to label comments for sentiment and engagement towards QS&T, achieving a Cohen’s kappa of 0.82 when pooling over multiple labelling repetitions and comparing with human annotations. We then used support-vector regression to determine if news article embeddings could be used to predict comment sentiment and engagement. After experimenting with various embedding strategies, including Sentence-BERT and RoBERTa models, no significant correlations were found between article content and comment sentiment or engagement towards QS&T. Further interdisciplinary work in empirical communication research and NLP is suggested to explore alternative representations for news articles and their ability to predict perceptions in news comments.Show less
This research examined the factors that influence the public perception of government response towards protests. A survey with a small sample size (N = 135) was used to acquire the data. The...Show moreThis research examined the factors that influence the public perception of government response towards protests. A survey with a small sample size (N = 135) was used to acquire the data. The results show that threat perception matters for the public’s preferred government response towards protests. The research found that policing measures were preferred more when people protesting against a new government policy began using violence against the police and destroyed public property. Additionally, the results showed that the subject of the protest matters for the threat perception. Policing measures were preferred more when people were protesting against the coronavirus lockdown than when they were protesting against a new government policy. Anti-lockdown protestors were thus deemed more threatening than people protesting against a new government policy. This was the case in a normal protesting situation and when people protested in an unauthorized location.Show less
