No abstract

The assessment of perceived risk by people is extremely important for safety and security management. Each person is based on the opinion of others to make a choice and the Internet represents the place where these opinions are mostly researched, found and reviewed. Social networks have a decisive impact: 92% of consumers say they have more trust in social media reviews than in any other form of advertising. For this reason, Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis have found interesting applications in the most diverse context, among which the most innovative is certainly represented by public safety and security. Security managers can use the perceptions expressed by people to discover the unexpected and potential weaknesses of a controlled environment or otherwise the risk and security perception of people that sometimes can be very different from real level of risk and security of a given site. Since the perceptions are the result of mostly unconscious elaborations, it is necessary to go deeper and to search for the emotions, triggered by the sensorial stimuli, that determine them. The objective of this paper is to study the perception of risk within the Pompeii Archaeological Park, giving emphasis to the emotional components, using the semantic analysis of the textual contents present in Twitter.

The evaluation of the perception of risk of people represents a vital element for security management. Each individual trusts other people's opinions to do a selection and the Internet represents the place where these opinions are mostly explored, obtained, and evaluated. Opinion mining and sentiment analysis embodies valuable means. They were primarily used as market investigation means to collect opinions about products and they have later turned out to be appropriate in other areas such as safety and security. Security managers can utilize the opinions communicated by individuals to find out the unforeseen vulnerabilities of a monitored location or at least the security assessment of persons which occasionally cannot be the same of the real level of security of a given site. Opinion mining can be useful when requiring continuous feedback about risk perception and to determine when an appropriate and prompt action is required based on the perceived risk and security. Gathering the opinions to be utilized for this objective requires seeking in different open sources (OSINT (Open Source INTelligence)) and therefore processing huge amount of digital data where information and knowledge must be extracted from. The objective of this paper is to study the perception of risk in the Royal Palace of Caserta (UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1997), focusing on the emotional elements, utilizing the semantic examination of the textual contents present in Twitter.

This paper proposes a methodology for sentiment analysis with emphasis on the emotional aspects of people visiting the Herculaneum Archaeological Park in Italy during the period of the COVID-19 pandemic. The methodology provides a valuable means of continuous feedback on perceived risk of the site. A semantic analysis on Twitter text messages provided input to the risk management team with which they could respond immediately mitigating any apparent risk and reducing the perceived risk. A two-stage approach was adopted to prune a massively large dataset from Twitter. In the first phase, a social network analysis and visualisation tool NodeXL was used to determine the most recurrent words, which was achieved using polarity. This resulted in a suitable subset. In the second phase, the subset was subjected to sentiment and emotion mapping by survey participants. This led to a hybrid approach of using automation for pruning datasets from social media and using a human approach to sentiment and emotion analysis. Whilst suffering from COVID-19, equally, people suffered due to loneliness from isolation dictated by the World Health Organisation. The work revealed that despite such conditions, people’s sentiments demonstrated a positive effect from the online discussions on the Herculaneum site.