Sentiment Analysis and Emotion Understanding during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Spain and Its Impact on Digital Ecosystems

Carlos de las Heras-Pedrosa, Pablo Sánchez-Núñez and José Ignacio Peláez
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Carlos de las Heras-Pedrosa: Department of Audiovisual Communication and Advertising, Faculty of Communication Sciences, Universidad de Málaga, 29071 Malaga, Spain
Pablo Sánchez-Núñez: Joint-PhD Programme in Communication, Universidad de Málaga, 29071 Malaga, Spain
José Ignacio Peláez: Department of Languages and Computer Science, Higher Technical School of Computer Engineering, Universidad de Málaga, 29071 Malaga, Spain

IJERPH, 2020, vol. 17, issue 15, 1-22

Abstract: COVID-19 has changed our lives forever. The world we knew until now has been transformed and nowadays we live in a completely new scenario in a perpetual restructuring transition, in which the way we live, relate, and communicate with others has been altered permanently. Within this context, risk communication is playing a decisive role when informing, transmitting, and channeling the flow of information in society. COVID-19 has posed a real pandemic risk management challenge in terms of impact, preparedness, response, and mitigation by governments, health organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), mass media, and stakeholders. In this study, we monitored the digital ecosystems during March and April 2020, and we obtained a sample of 106,261 communications through the analysis of APIs and Web Scraping techniques. This study examines how social media has affected risk communication in uncertain contexts and its impact on the emotions and sentiments derived from the semantic analysis in Spanish society during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Keywords: coronavirus; COVID-19; SARS-CoV-2; public health; health communication; sentiment analysis; emotion understanding; opinion mining; risk communication; social media (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

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