Evaluating Polarity Trend Amidst the Coronavirus Crisis in Peoples’ Attitudes toward the Vaccination Drive

Rakhi Batra, Ali Shariq Imran, Zenun Kastrati, Abdul Ghafoor, Sher Muhammad Daudpota and Sarang Shaikh
Additional contact information
Rakhi Batra: Department of Computer Science, Sukkur IBA University, Sukkur 65200, Pakistan
Ali Shariq Imran: Department of Computer Science (IDI), Norwegian University of Science & Technology (NTNU), 2815 Gjøvik, Norway
Zenun Kastrati: Department of Informatics, Linnaeus University, 351 95 Växjö, Sweden
Abdul Ghafoor: Department of Computer Science, Sukkur IBA University, Sukkur 65200, Pakistan
Sher Muhammad Daudpota: Department of Computer Science, Sukkur IBA University, Sukkur 65200, Pakistan
Sarang Shaikh: Department of Computer Science, Sukkur IBA University, Sukkur 65200, Pakistan

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 10, 1-14

Abstract: It has been more than a year since the coronavirus (COVID-19) engulfed the whole world, disturbing the daily routine, bringing down the economies, and killing two million people across the globe at the time of writing. The pandemic brought the world together to a joint effort to find a cure and work toward developing a vaccine. Much to the anticipation, the first batch of vaccines started rolling out by the end of 2020, and many countries began the vaccination drive early on while others still waiting in anticipation for a successful trial. Social media, meanwhile, was bombarded with all sorts of both positive and negative stories of the development and the evolving coronavirus situation. Many people were looking forward to the vaccines, while others were cautious about the side-effects and the conspiracy theories resulting in mixed emotions. This study explores users’ tweets concerning the COVID-19 vaccine and the sentiments expressed on Twitter. It tries to evaluate the polarity trend and a shift since the start of the coronavirus to the vaccination drive across six countries. The findings suggest that people of neighboring countries have shown quite a similar attitude regarding the vaccination in contrast to their different reactions to the coronavirus outbreak.

Keywords: coronavirus; COVID-19; pandemic; polarity assessment; opinion mining; emotion detection; Twitter posts; BERT; GloVe; DNN; LSTM; FastText; global crisis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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