Voices of Autism: Sentiment Analysis in Three Chinese Websites on Nonverbal Autistic Children

Autism community is now receiving broad attention from Chinese society. Though data-mining on textual data have been widely used, its application on Chinese language environment on autism is rare. The previous research on textual mining of online posts did not target a specific symptom exhibited on children with autism; meanwhile, the written language is limited to English. In this paper, we conduct a comparison on text analysis of parents, reporters and experts' online posts and published work, particularly targeting nonverbal autistic children. The text analysis contains the word frequency analysis and sentiment analysis. Our study revealed that parents tend to share emotional views, reporters are likely to provide introductory articles for the autism, and experts hold more critical comments for nonverbal autistic children.