Urban sustainability assessment based on sentiment analysis and entropy weight method: case study in Liaoning, China

Sustainability is indispensable for cities to achieve long-term positive development. This paper evaluated the sustainability of 14 cities in Liaoning province from 2015 to 2019. A new weighting method was proposed that combined the subjective dimensional weights derived from sentiment analysis with the objective indicator weights derived from the entropy weight method. Sentiment analysis was applied to process the text information in the government work reports for obtaining the sentiment scores of the three dimensions of the economy, society and environment. In addition, the raw data of the indicators were used to measure their importance of the indicators. The assessment results showed that Shenyang and Dalian had a much better level of sustainable development than other cities in Liaoning Province, with Shenyang and Dalian both having assessed values above 0.45. The three dimensions of sustainable development were unbalanced. Overall, the cities of Liaoning Province had a low level of sustainability and poor sustainability momentum. Finally, in response to the poor performance of economic and social sustainability, it is suggested that the authorities should take measures to boost domestic consumption and give more spending on health care and science and technology.