# Sports Information Needs in Chinese Online Q&A Community: Topic Mining Based on BERT
###### Abstract  
The online Question and Answering (Q&A) community has grown globally, allowing users to ask, discuss, and answer questions based on shared interests. As a gathering place for people's knowledge production, collaboration, and dissemination in the current Internet scene, the online Q&A community can intuitively reflect the public's information needs and behavior. It also collects many sports-related data and becomes an effective vehicle for comprehending mass sports information needs and disseminating sports knowledge. However, sports-related studies on the online Q&A community have rarely been reported. This study took the sports information in Zhihu, the largest Q&A community in China, as the research object to explore the public needs for sports information in China. We introduced the BERT model through a self-compiled python program and collected 391,092 sports-topic answers in the online Q&A community of Zhihu. Then, we explored the topic content, evolution trend, and user attributes of these answers. We found that the overall trend of sports information needs in Zhihu can be divided into three cycles: the London 2012 Olympic period, the Rio 2016 Olympic period, and the Tokyo 2020 Olympic period in general. The diversified content of information needs included 40 second-level themes and eight first-level themes. Male and female users had similarities and differences in sports information needs. The male and female users had the same information needs for fitness-related information. However, men were more concerned with confrontational solid sports such as basketball and football; women were more likely to care about weight loss, shape effect, and self-protection while doing sports activities. In addition, compared with men, women preferred to emphasize their gender attributes when expressing their needs for sports information to obtain more practical knowledge. In conclusion, our finding reveals that the sports community formed by the current online Q&A community in China is still a male-dominated information field. information needs; sports communication; sports in China; online Q&A community; BERT model; topic mining +
Footnote †: journal: Medical and Communication, Nanjing Normal University, No. 122, Ninghai Road, Gulou District, Nanjing 210097, China; 42396@nju. China, Zhihu, launched in 2011, has become the most influential online Q&A community platform. By January 2019, the users of Zhihu exceeded 220 million, accumulated more than 130 million answers, and Zhihu had established a community-driven business model [5]. Online Q&A communities such as Zhihu have changed the traditional mode of people's knowledge exchange, and their knowledge production, information interaction, user characteristics and business models have gradually received widespread attention in the academic field [6; 7; 8; 9]. As a platform for disseminating knowledge in the new media era, online Q&A communities can be seen as virtual knowledge aggregators that provide users with the flexibility to ask open-ended questions to a broad audience, the answers to which may be of great help to both the user and the community on specific topics such as health, sports or finance [10; 11; 12]. By 16 August 2021, the number of people following the sports topic in Zhihu had exceeded 10 million. Therefore, Zhihu has become a good channel for understanding Chinese public sports information needs. Exploring the sports information needs in online Q&A communities could deepen the understanding of sports ecology and development in online communities from users' perspectives. At the same time, it is of great significance to popularize scientific sports information knowledge and enhance public sports information literacy. An essential goal of data analysis is to determine the shared characteristics of data points [13]. It usually means determining which events or concepts are discussed in the document in text analysis.