Monitoring People’s Emotions and Symptoms from Arabic Tweets during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Coronavirus-19 (COVID-19) started from Wuhan, China, in late December 2019. It swept most of the world’s countries with confirmed cases and deaths. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the virus a pandemic on 11 March 2020 due to its widespread transmission. A public health crisis was declared in specific regions and nation-wide by governments all around the world. Citizens have gone through a wide range of emotions, such as fear of shortage of food, anger at the performance of governments and health authorities in facing the virus, sadness over the deaths of friends or relatives, etc. We present a monitoring system of citizens’ concerns using emotion detection in Twitter data. We also track public emotions and link these emotions with COVID-19 symptoms. We aim to show the effect of emotion monitoring on improving people’s daily health behavior and reduce the spread of negative emotions that affect the mental health of citizens. We collected and annotated 5.5 million tweets in the period from January to August 2020. A hybrid approach combined rule-based and neural network techniques to annotate the collected tweets. The rule-based technique was used to classify 300,000 tweets relying on Arabic emotion and COVID-19 symptom lexicons while the neural network was used to expand the sample tweets that were annotated using the rule-based technique. We used long short-term memory (LSTM) deep learning to classify all of the tweets into six emotion classes and two types (symptom and non-symptom tweets). The monitoring system shows that most of the tweets were posted in March 2020. The anger and fear emotions have the highest number of tweets and user interactions after the joy emotion. The results of user interaction monitoring show that people use likes and replies to interact with non-symptom tweets while they use re-tweets to propagate tweets that mention any of COVID-19 symptoms. Our study should help governments and decision-makers to dispel people’s fears and discover new symptoms associated with the symptoms that were declared by the WHO. It can also help in the understanding of people’s mental and emotional issues to address them before the impact of disease anxiety becomes harmful in itself.