Twitter Sentiment Analysis during COVID-19 Outbreak

Abstract

On 11th March 2020, World Health Organization announced COVID19 outbreak as a pandemic. Starting from China, this virus has infected and killed thousands of people from Italy, Spain, USA, Iran and other European countries as well. While this pandemic has continued to affect the lives of millions, a number of countries have resorted to complete lockdown. During this lockdown, people have taken social networks to express their feelings and find a way to calm themselves down. In this research work, country wise sentiment analysis of the tweets has been done. This research work has taken into account the tweets from twelve countries. These tweets have been gathered from 11th March 2020 to 31st March 2020, and are related to COVID19 in some or the other way. This analysis has been done to analyse how the citizens of different countries are dealing with the situation. The tweets have been collected, pre-processed, and then used for text mining and sentiment analysis. The results of the study concludes that while majority of the people throughout the world are taking a positive and hopeful approach, there are instances of fear, sadness and disgust exhibited worldwide. However, four countries, France, Switzerland, Netherland and United States of America have shown signs of distrust and anger on a bigger scale as compared to remaining eight countries.

Keywords: COVID-19, Pandemic, Corona Virus, Twitter, Sentiment Analysis