Sentiment Analysis and Stance Detection in Turkish Tweets About COVID-19 Vaccination

Abstract

Public health surveillance has gained more importance recently due the global COVID-19 pandemic. It is important to track public opinions and positions on social media automatically, so that this information can be used to improve public health. Sentiment analysis and stance detection are two social media analysis methods that can be applied to health-related social media posts for this purpose. In this chapter, the authors perform sentiment analysis and stance detection in Turkish tweets about COVID-19 vaccination. A sentiment- and stance-annotated Turkish tweet dataset about COVID-19 vaccination is created. Different machine learning approaches (SVM and Random Forest) are applied on this dataset, and the results are compared. Widespread COVID-19 vaccination is claimed to be useful in order to cope with this pandemic. Therefore, results of automatic sentiment and stance analysis on Twitter posts on COVID-19 vaccination can help public health professionals during their decision-making processes.