Abstract
The impact of COVID-19 on socio-economic fronts, public health related aspects and human interactions is undeniable. Amidst the social distancing protocols and the stay-at-home regulations imposed in several countries, citizens took to social media to cope with the emotional turmoil of the pandemic and respond to government issued regulations. In order to uncover the collective emotional response of Moroccan citizens to this pandemic and its effects, we use topic modeling to identify the most dominant COVID-19 related topics of interest amongst Moroccan social media users and sentiment/emotion analysis to gain insights into their reactions to various impactful events. The collected data consists of COVID-19 related comments posted on Twitter, Facebook and Youtube and on the websites of two popular online news outlets in Morocco (Hespress and Hibapress) throughout the year 2020. The comments are expressed in Moroccan Dialect (MD) or Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). To perform topic modeling and sentiment classification, we built a first Universal Language Model for the Moroccan Dialect (MD-ULM) using available corpora, which we have fine-tuned using our COVID-19 dataset. We show that our method significantly outperforms classical machine learning classification methods in Topic Modeling, Emotion Recognition and Polar Sentiment Analysis. To provide real-time infoveillance of these sentiments, we developed an online platform to automate the execution of the different processes, and in particular regular data collection. This platform is meant to be a decision-making assistance tool for COVID-19 mitigation and management in Morocco.
Highlights
IntroductionGiven the phylogenetic similarity to the previously isolated severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV), the new virus has been named SARS-CoV-2 [1]
We collected COVID-19 related comments, expressed by a community on social media throughout an entire year. This allowed us to derive meaningful insights on emotional responses to COVID-19 related topics and their evolution throughout the year of 2020; Unlike existing work, we collected COVID-19 related events and government policies and investigated social media users’ reactions during the time of their implementation; We proposed the first Universal Language Model for the Moroccan Dialect ‘MoroccanDarija-ULM’ (MD-ULM), as will be demonstrated in the Results section
In order to gauge the emotional response of Moroccan social media users to COVID-19 related news, we developed a data collection strategy that targeted the most popular social media sites in Morocco
Summary
Given the phylogenetic similarity to the previously isolated severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV), the new virus has been named SARS-CoV-2 [1].
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