Abstract: The online community is an effective channel for users to express their appeals. This paper collected the COVID-19 vaccine posts from Baidu Tieba and constructed an information appeal classification framework based on the user’s motivation to participate in the online community. Combining the framework with the BERT and the LDA model, this paper identified the users’ appeal types and appeal topics and analyzed the features of information appeals in online community from the aspects of information supply & demand and dissemination. The results show that users express their informational and psychological appeals mainly by seeking and sharing factual information, and these two types of appeal have commonalities and differences in the topic content. However, from the perspective of supply and demand, there are more serious quantitative and cognitive contradictions. Moreover, the appeal types and appeal topics have impacts on the information dissemination. The classification framework of user information appeal proposed in this study is helpful for in-depth mining of the value of online community information resources, and the results provide some references for establishing an effective information supply and demand mechanism and public opinion control strategy.

Key words: Information appeal, COVID-19 vaccine, Online community, Information seeking characteristics；Information sharing characteristics