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© 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.

Abstract

The online Question and Answering (Q&A) community has grown globally, allowing users to ask, discuss, and answer questions based on shared interests. As a gathering place for people’s knowledge production, collaboration, and dissemination in the current Internet scene, the online Q&A community can intuitively reflect the public’s information needs and behavior. It also collects many sports-related data and becomes an effective vehicle for comprehending mass sports information needs and disseminating sports knowledge. However, sports-related studies on the online Q&A community have rarely been reported. This study took the sports information in Zhihu, the largest Q&A community in China, as the research object to explore the public needs for sports information in China. We introduced the BERT model through a self-compiled python program and collected 391,092 sports-topic answers in the online Q&A community of Zhihu. Then, we explored the topic content, evolution trend, and user attributes of these answers. We found that the overall trend of sports information needs in Zhihu can be divided into three cycles: the London 2012 Olympic period, the Rio 2016 Olympic period, and the Tokyo 2020 Olympic period in general. The diversified content of information needs included 40 second-level themes and eight first-level themes. Male and female users had similarities and differences in sports information needs. The male and female users had the same information needs for fitness-related information. However, men were more concerned with confrontational solid sports such as basketball and football; women were more likely to care about weight loss, shape effect, and self-protection while doing sports activities. In addition, compared with men, women preferred to emphasize their gender attributes when expressing their needs for sports information to obtain more practical knowledge. In conclusion, our finding reveals that the sports community formed by the current online Q&A community in China is still a male-dominated information field.

Details

Title
Sports Information Needs in Chinese Online Q&A Community: Topic Mining Based on BERT
Author
Chuanlin Ning 1   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Xu, Jian 1 ; Gao, Hao 2   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Yang, Xi 3 ; Wang, Tianyi 1 

 School of Media and Communication, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, No. 800, Dongchuan Road, Minhang District, Shanghai 200240, China; [email protected] (C.N.); [email protected] (J.X.) 
 School of Journalism and Communication, Nanjing Normal University, No. 122, Ninghai Road, Gulou District, Nanjing 210097, China; [email protected] 
 School of Humanities, University of Southampton, Hartley Library B12, University Road, Highfield, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK; [email protected] 
First page
4784
Publication year
2022
Publication date
2022
Publisher
MDPI AG
e-ISSN
20763417
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
2662926493
Copyright
© 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.