Tracing Emotional Evolution along Named Entity Topic Chains: A Mechanistic Study of Chinese Social Media in the 2025 Myanmar Earthquake

Abstract. This study examines how emotional responses to transboundary disasters are structured and propagated within digital discourse, using the 2025 Myanmar earthquake as a case. Drawing on a dataset of 139,473 Chinese Weibo posts collected from March 28 to April 25, we develop an emotion – entity coupling framework that integrates large language model-based emotion annotation with named entity recognition (NER) to construct a semantic-affective network. Rather than treating sentiment as a standalone attribute, this approach models emotion as a dynamic and relational process that flows through named entities, which serve as semantic anchors and emotional conduits. The analysis reveals distinct patterns in both temporal emotion dynamics and structural emotion transmission. While emotions such as fear and surprise dominated the discourse, positive sentiments – particularly those associated with humanitarian actors – formed localized zones of empathic resonance. The coupled emotion–entity network exposed asymmetric affective pathways, with certain entities acting as hubs of amplification, bridge nodes, or buffers in the transmission of emotional meaning. Subgraph analysis further highlighted how institutional memory, geographical proximity, and media narratives shaped the stability and flow of public sentiment. By reconceptualizing emotion as structurally embedded and semantically routed, this study offers both theoretical and methodological innovations in disaster risk communication. The proposed framework advances understanding of how empathy and public engagement are generated, distributed, and sustained in the digital age – particularly in response to disasters that cross national borders.