Big data analysis of the Information available for consumers on the Internet (social networks, blogs and news) on the consumption of algae and algae-based products
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A big-data analysis of the information available on algae on the Internet (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, blogs, news, etc.) has been conducted. The analysis has been carried out not only on consumers' opinions, but to companies selling (producers, shops, restaurants, etc.) or using these products (spas, clinics, nutritionists), as they may influence consumer’s perception. Information has been obtained from the Internet using several tools available (awario.com, python libraries). State of the art machine learning techniques for natural language processing has been applied to process and classify the information obtained. BERT and Latent Dirichlet Analysis has been the algorithms selected for the analysis. Results suggests that the consumption of algae products is associated with a very strong positive sentiment. It is widely regarded as a sustainable vegan source of proteins, with lots of nutrients (vitamins, minerals, etc.) and properties (antioxidant, immunity boosting, etc.) and they are usually called “superfoods”. The consumption of these products is usually linked to a healthy lifestyle. However, some negative views can also be found (less than 5% of the posts analyzed). They are usually associated to side effects of consuming these products (iodine excess intake, health problems), false claims on product nutrition characteristics (not a source of omega3 or B12) or the bad taste and smell of these products. A lot of the information associated with positive sentiments is overly optimistic and are not supported by scientific evidence. Negative sentiment is closer to the current scientific evidence. The unrealistic optimism may constitute a long term risk for these products.
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ProFuture
Ongoing | 2019-2023
- Main funding source
- Horizon 2020 (EU Research and Innovation Programme)
- Geographical location
- Spain