Implementation of BERTopic for Topic Modeling Analysis of the Free Nutritious Meal Program Based on YouTube Comments
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.30871/jaic.v9i4.9754Keywords:
BERTopic, Topic Modeling, YouTube Comments, Free Nutritious Meal Program, Public PerceptionAbstract
The Free Nutritious Meal Program (Makan Bergizi Gratis), represents a significant national effort aimed at mitigating stunting rates in Indonesia, having commenced its operations in January 2025. As the program progressed, public sentiment towards it evolved, resulting in a diverse array of opinions that were extensively debated on various social media platforms, notably YouTube. This study was conducted with the objective of examining the perceptions of the public regarding Makan Bergizi Gratis through a topic modeling methodology employing the BERTopic approach, which analyzed 19,843 comments from YouTube. The analytical framework entailed several stages, including data preprocessing, sentence-based embedding representation, dimensionality reduction via UMAP, clustering through HDBSCAN, and topic interpretation grounded in c-TF-IDF. The findings indicate that public commentary is categorizable into ten primary themes, encompassing issues such as the involvement of political figures, concerns over budget transparency, the program's educational benefits, and the need for equitable access in underserved regions. Evaluation results show that BERTopic outperformed the traditional LDA model, with a coherence score of 0.46 compared to 0.39 and topic diversity of 76 percent compared to 71 percent. This analysis reveals that public perception of Makan Bergizi Gratis is multifaceted, shaped by social experience, political context, and economic expectations. These insights may serve as a valuable foundation for a more comprehensive understanding of public opinion, thereby supporting more targeted and responsive policy development.
Downloads
References
[1] A. Andin et al., “Penerapan Nilai Pancasila Melalui Program Makan Bergizi Gratis,” vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 370–383, 2025.
[2] A. Kiftiyah, F. A. Palestina, F. U. Abshar, and K. Rofiah, “Program Makan Bergizi Gratis (MBG) dalam Perspektif Keadilan Sosial dan DinamikaSosial–Politik,” J. Keindonesiaan, vol. 5, no. 1, 2025, doi: https://doi.org/10.52738/pjk.v5i1.726.
[3] S. H. Quamme and P. O. Iversen, “Prevalence of child stunting in Sub-Saharan Africa and its risk factors,” Clin. Nutr. Open Sci., vol. 42, no. 2022, pp. 49–61, 2022, doi: 10.1016/j.nutos.2022.01.009.
[4] I. Govender, S. Rangiah, R. Kaswa, and D. Nzaumvila, “Erratum to: Malnutrition in children under the age of 5 years in a primary health care setting (S Afr Fam Pract. 2021;63(1), a5337. 10.4102/safp.v63i1.5337),” South African Fam. Pract., vol. 63, no. 1, pp. 1–6, 2021, doi: 10.4102/SAFP.V63I1.5416.
[5] H. Hatijar, “The Incidence of Stunting in Infants and Toddlers,” J. Ilm. Kesehat. Sandi Husada, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 224–229, 2023, doi: 10.35816/jiskh.v12i1.1019.
[6] A. Andiani, T. Lestari, and T. Sumiati, “Gambaran Pengetahuan Remaja Tentang Stunting,” J. Biosainstek, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 17–20, 2023, doi: 10.52046/biosainstek.v5i2.1641.
[7] F. Agushybana, A. Pratiwi, P. L. Kurnia, N. Nandini, J. Santoso, and A. Setyo, “Reducing Stunting Prevalence: Causes, Impacts, and Strategies,” BIO Web Conf., vol. 54, pp. 1–6, 2022, doi: 10.1051/bioconf/20225400009.
[8] E. A. Suryana and M. Azis, “the Potential of Economic Loss Due To Stunting in Indonesia,” J. Ekon. Kesehat. Indones., vol. 8, no. 1, p. 52, 2023, doi: 10.7454/eki.v8i1.6796.
[9] D. L. Lestari, Y. H. Gusmira, A. Mashdarul, and A. Y. Amelia, “Free Nutritious Meal Policy As A Solution To Overcoming The Stunting Problem In Indonesia,” vol. 4, pp. 10021–10031, 2024.
[10] S. S. Fasha and D. Tesniyadi, “Analisis Wacana Kritis Pada Artikel Tempo.co Yang Berjudul "Dana BOS Untuk Program Makan Siang Gratis”,” vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 15077–15089, 2024, doi: https://doi.org/10.31004/innovative.v4i3.12362.
[11] A. Purnomo, A. Putikadyanto, and A. Nur, “Program Makan Bergizi Gratis : Analisis Kritis Transformasi Pendidikan Indonesia Menuju Generasi Emas 2045,” 2025.
[12] K. Andreas et al., “Tinjauan Kritis Tentang Program Makan Bergizi Gratis Terhadap Produktivitas Belajar Siswa,” vol. 2, 2025.
[13] A. A. Merlinda and Y. Yusuf, “Analisis Program Makan Gratis Prabowo Subianto Terhadap Strategi Peningkatan Motivasi Belajar Siswa di Sekolah Tinjauan dari Perspektif Sosiologi Pendidikan,” vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 1364–1373, 2025.
[14] X. Huang et al., “Social media mining under the COVID-19 context: Progress, challenges, and opportunities,” Int. J. Appl. Earth Obs. Geoinf., vol. 113, no. March, p. 102967, 2022, doi: 10.1016/j.jag.2022.102967.
[15] L. Kauffman, E. M. Weisberg, J. Eng, and E. K. Fishman, “YouTube and Radiology: The Viability, Pitfalls, and Untapped Potential of the Premier Social Media Video Platform for Image-Based Education,” vol. 29, no. 5, pp. 1–8, 2022, doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acra.2020.12.018.
[16] A. Khakim and M. Zubaidi, “The Necessity of Educational Content for Indonesian Society Through YouTube Channels,” pp. 296–309, 2024, doi: https://doi.org/10.38142/ijssc.v2i3.225.
[17] T. S. Fischer, C. Kolo, and C. Mothes, “Political Influencers on YouTube: Business Strategies and Content Characteristics,” Media Commun., vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 259–271, 2022, doi: 10.17645/mac.v10i1.4767.
[18] W. Sui, A. Sui, and R. E. Rhodes, “What to watch: Practical considerations and strategies for using YouTube for research,” Digit. Heal., vol. 8, 2022, doi: 10.1177/20552076221123707.
[19] A. Abuzayed and H. Al-Khalifa, “BERT for Arabic Topic Modeling: An Experimental Study on BERTopic Technique,” Procedia CIRP, vol. 189, pp. 191–194, 2021, doi: 10.1016/j.procs.2021.05.096.
[20] C. C. Silva, M. Galster, and F. Gilson, “Topic modeling in software engineering research,” Empir. Softw. Eng., vol. 26, no. 6, 2021, doi: 10.1007/s10664-021-10026-0.
[21] D. Aryani, I. Lucia Kharisma, A. Sujjada, and K. Kamdan, “Topic Modeling of the 2024 Election Using the BERTopic Method on Detik.com News Articles,” Inf. J. Ilm. Bid. Teknol. Inf. dan Komun., vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 171–180, 2024, doi: 10.25139/inform.v9i2.8429.
[22] T. Informasi, “Jurnal Identifikasi Opini Publik Terhadap Kendaraan Listrik dari Data Komentar YouTube : Pemodelan Topik Menggunakan BERTopic,” vol. 10, pp. 195–203, 2024.
[23] A. A. Syam, G. H. M, A. Salim, D. F. Surianto, and M. F. B, “Analisis teknik preprocessing pada sentimen masyarakat terkait konflik israel-palestina menggunakan support vector machine,” vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 1464–1472, 2024.
[24] N. Charibaldi, A. Harfiani, and O. Samuel Simanjuntak, “Comparison of the Effect of Word Normalization on Naïve Bayes Classifier and K-Nearest Neighbor Methods for Sentiment Analysis,” Inf. J. Ilm. Bid. Teknol. Inf. dan Komun., vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 25–31, 2023, doi: 10.25139/inform.v9i1.7111.
[25] K. Maharana, S. Mondal, and B. Nemade, “A review: Data pre-processing and data augmentation techniques,” Glob. Transitions Proc., vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 91–99, 2022, doi: 10.1016/j.gltp.2022.04.020.
[26] P. Wahyuni and M. A. Romli, “Comparison of Naïve Bayes Classifier and Decision Tree Algorithms for Sentiment Analysis on the House of Representatives ’ Right of Inquiry on Twitter,” vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 523–530, 2024.
[27] C. S. Ponay, “Topic Modeling on Customer Feedback from an Online Ticketing System using Latent Dirichlet Allocation and BERTopic,” Proc. - 2022 2nd Int. Conf. Inf. Comput. Res. iCORE 2022, no. April, pp. 1–6, 2022, doi: 10.1109/iCORE58172.2022.00020.
[28] M. Grootendorst, “BERTopic: Neural topic modeling with a class-based TF-IDF procedure,” 2022, [Online]. Available: http://arxiv.org/abs/2203.05794
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Widya Wahyuni, Tri Putri Lestari, Milla Apriliana, Riyang Gumelta

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License (Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) ) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).








