Exploring Public Perceptives on Palliative and Hospice Care in Social Media: Topic Modeling and Multi-Class Sentiment...

Palliative care ensures patients' dignity and quality of life while supporting families during serious illness. However, barriers such as inadequate awareness hinder access to these services. This study analyzed 9,147 perspectives about palliative and hospice care posted on Naver Knowledge iN, a popular online platform in South Korea, using contextualized topic modeling and multi-class sentiment analysis (SA). Nine major themes were identified. SA showed that "sadness" was the most common emotion, followed by "neutral" and "anxiety." Notably, negative emotions were closely tied to "emotional and psychological support" theme. The KoBERT model used for SA achieved an accuracy of 0.73 and F1-score of 0.72. These findings highlight the need to address misconceptions and enhance public awareness of palliative care. Recommendations include creating targeted educational resources, implementing proactive screening for emotional distress, and establishing accessible communication platforms.