This study by Gang Han, Menggang Li, Yiduo Mei and Deming Li examines topical analysis of coverage of the Belt and Road system.
In order to comprehensively evaluate the achievements of the 'Belt and Road' in integrated transportation, researchers need to optimize the method of generating evaluation indices and construct the framework structure of the 'Belt and Road' transportation index system. This paper used GDELT database as data source and obtained full text data of English news in 25 countries along ‘the Belt and Road’. The paper also introduced the topic model, combined with the unsupervised method (latent Dirichlet allocation, LDA) and the supervision method (labeled LDA) to mine the topics contained in the news data. It constructed the transportation development model and analyzed the development trend of transportation in various countries. The study found that the development trend of transportation in the countries along the line is unbalanced, which can be divided into four types: rapid development type, stable development type, slow development type and lagging development type. The method of this paper can effectively extract temporal and spatial variation of news events, discover potential risks in various countries, support real-time and dynamic monitoring of the social development situation of the countries along the border and provide auxiliary decision support for implementation of the ‘the Belt and Road’ initiative, which has important application value.