Sentiment Analysis of COVID-19 tweets by Deep Learning Classifiers—A study to show how popularity is affecting accuracy in social media

Abstract

COVID-19 originally known as Corona VIrus Disease of 2019, has been declared as a pandemic by World Health Organization (WHO) on 11th March 2020. Unprecedented pressures have mounted on each country to make compelling requisites for controlling the population by assessing the cases and properly utilizing available resources. The rapid number of exponential cases globally has become the apprehension of panic, fear and anxiety among people. The mental and physical health of the global population is found to be directly proportional to this pandemic disease. The current situation has reported more than twenty four million people being tested positive worldwide as of 27th August, 2020. Therefore, it is the need of the hour to implement different measures to safeguard the countries by demystifying the pertinent facts and information. This paper aims to bring out the fact that tweets containing all handles related to COVID-19 and WHO have been unsuccessful in guiding people around this pandemic outbreak appositely. This study analyzes two types of tweets gathered during the pandemic times. In one case, around twenty three thousand most re-tweeted tweets within the time span from 1st Jan 2019 to 23rd March 2020 have been analyzed and observation says that the maximum number of the tweets portrays neutral or negative sentiments. On the other hand, a dataset containing 226,668 tweets collected within the time span between December 2019 and May 2020 have been analyzed which contrastingly show that there were a maximum number of positive and neutral tweets tweeted by netizens. The research demonstrates that though people have tweeted mostly positive regarding COVID-19, yet netizens were busy engrossed in re-tweeting the negative tweets and that no useful words could be found in WordCloud or computations using word frequency in tweets. The claims have been validated through a proposed model using deep learning classifiers with admissible accuracy up to 81%. Apart from these the authors have proposed the implementation of a Gaussian membership function based fuzzy rule base to correctly identify sentiments from tweets. The accuracy for the said model yields up to a permissible rate of 79%.