Detecting Emotional Evolution on Twitter during the COVID-19 Pandemic Using Text Analysis

Javier Cabezas, Daniela Moctezuma, Alberto Fernández-Isabel and Isaac Martín de Diego
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Javier Cabezas: Data Science Laboratory, Rey Juan Carlos University, 28933 Móstoles, Spain
Daniela Moctezuma: Centro de Investigación en Ciencias de Información Geoespacial, Tlalpan 14240, Mexico
Alberto Fernández-Isabel: Data Science Laboratory, Rey Juan Carlos University, 28933 Móstoles, Spain
Isaac Martín de Diego: Data Science Laboratory, Rey Juan Carlos University, 28933 Móstoles, Spain

IJERPH, 2021, vol. 18, issue 13, 1-20

Abstract: Early in 2020, an unexpected and hazardous situation occurred threatening and challenging all of humankind. A new coronavirus called SARS-CoV-2 was first identified in Wuhan, China, and its related disease, called COVID-19, has induced one of the most dangerous crises at a global level since World War II. The ultra-fast transmission rate of the virus and the high mortality rate led the World Health Organization (WHO) to officially declare the situation a pandemic. Governments, for their part, were forced to implement unprecedented mobility restrictions and cease a large part of their economic activities. These facts triggered multiple reactions from people who expressed their feelings mainly through social networks (like Twitter), using them as vectors of information and opinion. In this paper, a study carried out in different Spanish speaking countries (Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Spain) is presented, which addresses the manner in which the evolution of the pandemic outbreak has affected the emotions expressed by individuals on Twitter over the last 13 months (from March 2020 to March 2021). We used a total of 3 million tweets to achieve this task. We made use of a well-known framework called EmoWeb to capture the dynamic variation in the sentimental value of pandemic-related words. The results reflect to what degree the pandemic and its derived problems have influenced and affected the population of the selected countries in different ways. The outcomes also illustrate the evolution over time of opinions published on Twitter regarding several topics related to COVID-19.

Keywords: sentiment analysis; COVID-19; Twitter; dynamic sentiment; social networks; pandemic evolution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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