Bridging NLP with Environmental Management by Sentiment Analysis and Topic Modeling on Offshore Wind Energy

Author

Isabele Mansur Costa Bittencourt, Montclair State University

Date of Award

5-2024

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

College/School

College of Science and Mathematics

Department/Program

School of Computing

Thesis Sponsor/Dissertation Chair/Project Chair

Aparna S. Varde

Committee Member

Hao Liu

Committee Member

Pankaj Lal

Committee Member

Anna Feldman

Abstract

Offshore wind energy, which uses the power of winds on the seas to generate electricity, has emerged as a promising renewable energy source and an alternative for low-carbon future markets, especially during the climate crisis the world has been experiencing. However, it still raises controversial thoughts between people. Furthermore, amid the growth of the offshore wind energy market, the investigation of related topics, such as its impacts on wildlife, has become very common. Thus, this master’s thesis delves into the analysis of public and media opinion towards offshore wind energy. We use natural language processing techniques and pre-trained rule and lexicon-based models such as TextBlob, Vader, and SentiWordNet to understand the overall sentiment regarding offshore wind energy in New Jersey. We also perform topic modeling, using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and BERTopic, to identify core topics revolving offshore wind energy on social media, US news and wildlife related research papers. While our sentiment analysis results indicate a predominantly positive reception in social and news media, the themes within our topic modeling analyses show high concerns and uneasiness towards wildlife related implications. Our results give the research community valuable insights on different dimensions of offshore wind energy and its broader impacts on society using computational methods and discourse analysis, highlighting the importance of tailoring policies to public opinion and identifying potential risks and concerns in the process of building more on the investment and acceptance of offshore wind farms.

File Format

PDF

Recommended Citation

Bittencourt, Isabele Mansur Costa, "Bridging NLP with Environmental Management by Sentiment Analysis and Topic Modeling on Offshore Wind Energy" (2024). Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects. 1424.
https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/etd/1424