Sentiment Analysis of Media in German on the Refugee Crisis in Europe

Abstract

Since the summer of 2015, the refugee crisis in Europe has grown to be one of the biggest challenges Europe has faced since WW2. The development of this humanitarian crisis are the topic of discussions throughout Europe and covered by media on a daily basis. Germany in particular has been the focus of migration. Over time, in Germany and the neighboring German speaking countries a shift could be observed, from the initial hospitable Willkommenskultur (welcome culture), to more reserved and skeptical points of view. These factors - Germany as the prime-destination for migrants, as well as a shift in public perception and media coverage - are the motivation for our analysis. The current article investigates the coverage of this crisis on traditional and social media, employing sentiment analysis to detect tendencies and relates these to real-world events. To this end, sentiment analysis was applied to textual documents of a data-set collected from relevant and highly circulated German, Austrian and Swiss traditional media sources and from social media in the course of six months from October 2015 to March of 2016.