“The sum of all our feelings! ”: Sentimental analysis on Chinese autism sites

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopment disorder affecting 1 in 68 individuals in the US according to the latest Center for Disease Control (CDC) report. In Asia, however, the diagnosis, assessment and intervention of ASD is significantly lagging behind its western counterpart: there is no systematic prevalence study in China yet as to how many of its population has been affected by ASD. In this paper, we present our study, the first of its kind, to offer some preliminary, yet early valuable insights into the practices, knowledge and public awareness of ASD through lexical-affinity based emotion analysis on textual contents extracted from a notably well-known Chinese support site on ASD and one enormously popular social media site-Weibo. Mixed results were obtained. The ‘sum’ of our feeling is potentially positive and encouraging; yet the data obtained from Weibo are in line with previous works that public awareness of ASD is very low in China and the Asia Pacific region. Thanks to the increasing Chinese government supports and more research and development in this area, it is our ‘collective’ hope that more HCI community can engage in such efforts in China.